Bolsonaro´s Law : Chilean Senator proposes Bill to penalise candidates spreading Fake News

As “a necessary reform to protect democracy," Senator Alejandro Navarro called the constitutional rule he proposed to Congress and that will sanction "with the cessation of the presidential, parliamentary, municipal or regional government candidacy, when it is responsible for the dissemination of false news of an electoral contender, during the respective campaign".

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24/10/2018 1:21pm

“This reform will sanction the new way of doing politics adopted by the far right politicians, which advances using Big Data, that is: by researching the preferences of Internet social network users, and then spreading lies and destroying the reputation of their contenders», said the Chilean Senator.

He added that “fake news, or false news, are difficult to fight, because voters are left with the first impression. Likewise, the electoral lie has devastating effects on the political debate, because whoever utters them is hardly going to take them back, and it is likely that they never will».

«A President or Prime Minister must be a leader who triumphs without cheating in the political debate or in the polls. Otherwise, it will win the candidate that lies the most, the one that has more access to misinforming through social networks, the one that hires more political marketing companies to manipulate the information and deliver false content in a deliberate manner. That is not having a healthy democracy», said the congressman.

Navarro explained what he refers to as «Bolsonaro Law» to his legislative proposal «due to the questioned way of doing politics of the presidential candidate in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been accused of having paid for the dissemination of false news regarding his contender in the presidential elections in Brazil”.

“Something similar happened with Donald Trump, when he was accused of using the Cambridge Analytica system, which studied user profiles of Facebook, to send them false personalized news in favor of his candidacy» said the parliamentarian.

Alejandro Navarro ended making a call to politicians all over the World: “this is a planetary challenge against that dangerous right wing, and especially the extreme right wing groups, so I hope that parliamentarians from all over the world do the same: propose laws to give electoral sanctions for crimes like these, for fake news , using big data”.