Brazil: Big Tech cries ‘censorship’ and spreads disinformation

As one of the world’s largest digital markets, Brazil has faced political pressure from Big Tech for years. Beyond the headline-grabbing clashes(opens in new window) between Elon Musk and Brazilian judges, the country has seen some of the most intense and well-resourced lobbying by Big Tech companies. Data compiled(opens in new window) by the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP) and Agência Pública found that Big Tech had 1,850 lobbying meetings between 2019 and 2025. That’s one every two working days. An extraordinary level of access, and yet just the tip of the iceberg.

A substantial amount of this lobbying power was brought to bear on two pieces of legislation: the Fake News Bill and the Digital Child Protection Law. This long read draws insights from civil society and academic researchers who have first-hand experience with Big Tech’s lobbying in Brazil.

Spreading fake news to kill the Fake News Bill

When Brazilian Senators drafted PL 2630(opens in new window) , the so-called Fake News Bill, they aimed to hold digital platforms responsible for the harm unleashed by their enabling of disinformation and hate speech. The proposal was put forward in 2020, when the country was still reeling(opens in new window) from the disinformation surrounding President Jair Bolsonaro’s election and at a time when Covid-19 conspiracies were widely promoted via social media and messaging channels, including WhatsApp, YouTube, and Facebook.

The bill was quickly approved by the Brazilian Senate, but then got stuck in Congress. That was until urgency intensified with the January 2023 attack(opens in new window) on Congress and the Supreme Court by supporters of Bolsonaro, and following a series of fatal school attacks that researchers linked(opens in new window) to disinformation circulating on digital platforms.

While civil society welcomed PL 2630 as an opportunity to repair a frayed democracy, Big Tech companies treated the proposal as a direct threat to their business models. They responded with an aggressive lobbying campaign that attempted to dilute and derail the bill.

Re-framing Fake News Bill as censorship

The moment Congress moved PL 2630 forward, Google, Meta, YouTube, and Twitter launched a coordinated campaign(opens in new window) to brand the bill as a “censorship law”, describing it as a threat to freedom of speech and expression. Meta, Google, and Twitter published a joint letter(opens in new window) in February 2022 that claimed that the bill would “restrict people’s access to diverse and plural sources of information”.

Big Tech has become adept at co-opting concepts and casting itself as a champion of digital rights and freedom of information. As Bruno Mattos, Coordinator of Projects at NetLab, a research centre linked to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, explained: “Platform companies like Google posed themselves as a victim of ‘censorship’ and tried to pen a scenario to the public that it would be bad for users and tech companies”.

One particularly insidious version of the censorship argument was used to manipulate religious groups, with Big Tech-funded associations making the inflammatory claim(opens in new window) that PL 2630 could lead to parts of the Bible being banned. This assertion was shared with Evangelical members of Congress in an anonymous document(opens in new window) . According to subsequent news reports, a trade association called Câmara-e.net, representing firms such as Meta, claimed authorship. Reporters also found that similar documents were circulated by Frente Digital, a cross-party parliamentary group(opens in new window) , at the time managed by a Big Tech-funded organisation.

“The ‘censorship’ narrative said the bill would force publishers to delete Bible verses”, recalled Gabrielle Graça de Farias, a Competition and Human Rights researcher at FGV Rio. “It was absurd. But it worked. It created religious panic in Brazil, which is a country with a strong religious community”.

Lobbying data analysed by Pública later revealed(opens in new window) that trade associations representing Big Tech companies such as Câmara-e.net and the Latin American Internet Association (ALAI) were heavily lobbying Brazilian policymakers behind the scenes. “These groups create the illusion that opposition to PL 2630 came from a broad coalition rather than from a handful of powerful companies fighting to protect their business model”, said Humberto Ribeiro, Co-founder and Director at Sleeping Giants Brasil.

While co-opting language and ideas and imbuing words with their own, self-serving meanings is a common enough corporate lobbying tactic, Big Tech platforms showed no qualms using heavily contested political and religious themes to advance their business interests. This willingness to muddy the waters is particularly dangerous, as the companies control the key communication platforms where public discussion occurs. The online fake news that PL 2630 was intended to combat was simply deployed as part of the strategy to kill the fake news bill.

Weaponising their own platforms

In 2023, after two years of discussions, the Brazilian Congress was finally heading towards a vote on PL 2630. It was at this time that Big Tech companies escalated their campaign and weaponised their own platforms to shape public opinion – the heaviest resistance all taking place within just one week.

Before the vote, anyone (opens in new window) who searched for “PL 2630” on Google saw an advertisement placed by Google itself at the top of the page, linking to a Google blog post titled “How PL 2630 Can Make Your Internet Worse(opens in new window) ”. Research from NetLab(opens in new window) showed that at this time, Google search results also prioritised pages that echoed Google’s position.

YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, deployed a similar tactic. A blog post titled “How hasty legislation can impact YouTube creators(opens in new window) ” urged content creators to oppose the bill. YouTube(opens in new window) even inserted alerts into creators’ dashboards, pushing them to take a public stand against PL 2630.

Other platforms helped spread Google’s message. Spotify(opens in new window) and Meta(opens in new window) both ran Google’s ads. The result was a coordinated show of corporate power. The same digital infrastructure that the bill sought to regulate was turned against the democratic process and used to influence the outcome of the vote.

According to Débora Salles, Head of Research at NetLab, Google effectively monopolised paid traffic during the debate. Google dominated the volume of political advertising surrounding this bill, but also gave itself top billing in related search results. Salles noted that Spotify(opens in new window) ran Google’s ads in violation of its own terms and conditions, which prohibit paid political content. Meta(opens in new window) also initially failed(opens in new window) to classify Google’s ads as political, even though its policy requires such ads to be flagged as sensitive.

Finally, on 1 May 2023, the day before the vote was scheduled(opens in new window) , millions of Brazilians opened Google’s homepage to find a warning banner claiming that the bill would “increase the confusion between what is true and what is false in Brazil”.

The link redirected users to the same Google blog post(opens in new window) it had used in its ads. It was a direct lobbying message inserted into the monopolised platform itself to influence public opinion.

It was a tactic Australians would recognise (see the Australia case). Just a few years before, Google and Meta had successfully weaponised their platforms to derail legislation in that country.

The show of force did not go unnoticed by Brazilian authorities. Brazil’s(opens in new window) National Consumer Secretariat, part of the Ministry of Justice, immediately accused Google of misleading advertising and demanded the company remove the content, setting a fine of BRL 1 million (EUR 159,000) per hour if Google did not comply. While denying any wrongdoing, Google did remove the link from its homepage. The Supreme Court(opens in new window) also ordered Google, Meta, and Spotify to remove coordinated ads and content attacking PL 2630, under threat of fines.

But by this point, it was too late. It was already the day of the vote, and there was not enough congressional support. The vote was cancelled(opens in new window) . The bill would be revised.

Even then, Telegram(opens in new window) jumped on the bandwagon and pushed its own mass notification urging millions of users to “defend free speech” and automatically redirected them to a page set up to send protest emails to members of Congress.

In the aftermath, Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, launched (opens in new window) an antitrust investigation into Google and Meta, while the Federal Police(opens in new window) started a procedure against Google and others for alleged manipulation and abuse of their economic power in the PL 2630 campaign. The companies defended their actions, arguing(opens in new window) they were simply using their freedom of expression, and denied tweaking their algorithms. Both investigations were quietly archived(opens in new window) the following(opens in new window) year.

Although Brazilian authorities pushed back against the blatantly aggressive campaigning by Big Tech, and the abuse of power by several companies was examined, the lobbying had the desired result. The bill had become too controversial. Arthur Lira, President of the Chamber of Deputies, told journalists (opens in new window) that “when a text gains a narrative like this, it simply does not have support”. The Fake News Bill was scrapped at the end of 2024, with little hope of revival.

When fake news fails: the story of the Digital Child Protection Law

In August 2025, a viral video(opens in new window) by the influencer Felca raised public alarm over the lack of accountability of digital platforms for the sexual and commercial exploitation of children online. In it, Felca exposed how Big Tech platforms were hosting, amplifying, and monetising content that sexualised and endangered children. Social networks were flooded with anger directed squarely at Big Tech companies. Lawmakers felt immediate pressure to respond.

PL 2628(opens in new window) , a draft law proposing online safety measures that had been shuffling through the legislative process since 2022, was fast-tracked. As soon as the bill started advancing, the same actors who had attacked PL 2630 were back in action, deploying well-tested lobbying tactics to water it down.

An alliance with far-right politics

Once again, regulation was labelled as censorship. However, this time the companies stayed in the background and let others push the agenda. Far-right influencers and some parliamentarians (opens in new window) branded PL 2628 as “state control of the internet”, applying the same language used against PL 2630. An online campaign(opens in new window) emerged, labelling the bill “PL of Censorship 2.0”.

The lightening rod issue was the sanctions envisioned by the bill. With PL 2628, regulators would have the power to shut down social networks. However, the campaigns against the law ignored the fact that this was a last resort power, to be used in cases where children were at grave risk, or there was repeated non-compliance by companies.

Throughout the debate on PL 2628, Big Tech companies avoided using the word “censorship” themselves. Instead, their lobbyists met with lawmakers directly and provided technical input to the discussion that would water down the bill.(opens in new window) Their lobbying was complemented by associations like Digital Council (Conselho Digital)(opens in new window) , which argued(opens in new window) that there was a risk that “providers will be incentivised to simply remove legitimate content, instead of protecting freedom of expression or privacy”. Conselho Digital ranks Google and Meta amongst its members.

These technical inputs found their way into official discussions. Intercept Brasil, an online media outlet, found(opens in new window) that a Bolsonaro-supporting deputy had tabled amendments to PL 2628 seeking to remove reporting obligations for companies and eliminate sanctions for non-compliance. When journalists analysed the document metadata, they found both amendments had been written by a Meta lobbyist.

As Flora de Castro Santana, Legal and Policy Coordinator at Sleeping Giants Brasil, explained,

“Big Tech supplies the technocratic talking points, and the far right translates them into open slogans about censorship to mobilise its base”.

Although the strategy had worked before, with PL 2628, the narrative collapsed. “[The companies] did not have time to spin it”, recalled Gabrielle Graça de Farias of FGV Rio. “Any company defending itself against PL 2628 looked complicit”. The public backlash removed the political space for the usual Big Tech playbook. Attempts to delay the vote lost momentum. Under intense scrutiny and public demand for action, Congress moved forward and approved the bill.

Two bills, two different outcomes, and key lessons

Brazil’s experience with the Fake News Bill and the Digital Child Protection Law shows how far Big Tech will go to protect its monopolistic business model. Co-opting the language of freedom of speech to defend not tackling fake news and weaponising their own platforms to distort public debate, the companies succeeded in killing the Fake News Bill. As the tech giants increasingly aligned themselves with far-right movements, Brazil’s experience trying to combat harmful content offers some salutary lessons (and a preview of what was to come when Trump was re-elected; see US case).

The different fate of the Digital Child Protection Law also offers lessons. The corporate tactics were countered by intense public pressure, and the companies did not have the time to reframe the issue again.