While the bill was written to combat the spread of misinformation and foster a diversity of viewpoints in online news, many seasoned fact-checkers take issue with some of its provisions.

A Brazilian bill designed to contain the spread of mis- and disinformation narrowly failed an “accelerated pathway” vote Wednesday in the lower house of Congress, one of two representative voting bodies in Brazil's bicameral Congress. The future of  PL 2630 — also known as the “Fake News” bill —  will be determined at a later, still undetermined date.

Despite the bill's aim to contain the spread of mis- and disinformation, it faces predictable resistance from tech companies’ and, perhaps more surprisingly, independent fact-checking organizations in the region, which say they are concerned with its potential impact.

Some of the bills’ mandates include:

• Mass text-messaging would be prohibited for political purposes.
• Any foreign company would be required to have legal representation in Brazil.
• Tech companies would be required to publish reports for each instance of content demonetization and removal.
• Politicians would no longer be able to earn Brazilian Real for their posts to social media.
• YouTube would be required to pay all news operations for content on its platform.

Executives at YouTube have lamented that what “journalism” means isn’t clearly defined in the bill, and that channels would have to be notified when content gets demoted (and for what reason) — a gargantuan task given the scale of YouTube’s platform. Certain legislators in Brazil would also no longer be bound to YouTube’s service rules.

“Under this bill, members of Brazil’s legislative branch wouldn’t have to follow our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines. And every time our system demotes content for any reason, we’d have to inform similar channels, burying creators with countless notifications,” the chief business officer of YouTube, Robert Kyncl, wrote in a Twitter thread.

The resistance toward the bill is shared by local fact-checking organizations.

“I believe that the section about payment for journalistic content — as it is — could be very harmful not only to fact checkers, but to journalism as a whole,” said Bernardo Barbosa, assistant editor of UOL Confere, a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network,“because it does not define clearly what is journalistic content or what is a journalism company. We know by now that many outlets that spread disinformation try to look like a legitimate journalistic operation.”

“It is hard to assess what is professional journalism, and who should be able to receive such subsidies from the platforms,” said co-founder and executive director of Aos Fatos. “I think that fact-checkers could also be vulnerable to judicial abuse, because some congressmen could be angry that we are publishing something says what they’re sharing is false or misleading. It makes us vulnerable.”

Though Nalon agreed with YouTube’s general sentiment that the law could lead to additional funding for false-information disseminators, she also mentioned that some big tech companies are already sponsoring many purveyors of misinformation via ad-revenue. 

“Actually we know for a fact that, in Brazil, and many other countries, Google already funds misinformation because Google ads can be on any website. We know of some websites that publish false news, they receive money from advertising through google ads,” Nalon said.

Since the accelerated voting pathway for Pl 2630/2020 was denied last week, the question remains when the vote will happen.