In the midst of the pandemic, in 2021, US "surgeon general" Vivek Murthy, who vocalizes the country's public health issues at the federal level, warned that misinformation was causing unnecessary illness and death and called for transparency and accountability for the so-called Big techs. Days later, according to an article in The New York Times, Nick Clegg, then Facebook's vice president of global affairs, responded to the member of the Joe Biden government in a private message: "It's not very nice to be accused of killing people."

Facebook today is called Meta, and Clegg is the chairman of the department. The acute moment of the pandemic has passed, and the disease of misinformation has worsened. Despite what the executive recruited to the highest level of the British civil service might think, it continues to kill people and endanger democracies across the planet.

The uproar surrounding a new regulation for social networks has been raging in Folha since the Unesco conference two weeks ago, in which Brazil was an important player due to the letter sent by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the 8th of January and the use of intensive, large-scale technological tools not yet fully tested. Yes, this thing that we have in our hands and that revolutionizes our existence in several aspects, is an ongoing social experiment, without precedent, with serious and complex adverse effects.

Journalism can become a victim, rightly warns this newspaper in an editorial. The creation of committees to arbitrate content, one of the many ideas under debate, can easily lead to censorship. The last column by Wilson Gomes points to another complicating factor, the number of agents inside the Lula government getting involved in the discussion.

At the same time, it is imperative to subject companies to more regulation. In the US Supreme Court, Google defends itself against the accusation of having promoted videos that enticed extremists to the 2015 attacks in Paris. It is being sued by a couple, the Gonzales, who lost their daughter in the Bataclan nightclub. Even though the transmission of this type of content can be understood as freedom of expression, does the algorithm working to spread it further and monetize it mean nothing?

Like Folha, there are those who see a way out in breaking the monopoly and size of technology giants. It would be a solution similar to the dissolution of Standard Oil, in 1911, the largest company of its time, broken up into dozens of smaller firms. It is a mere detail that, half a century later, seven of them were ruling the world, with repercussions to this day.

Perhaps the analogy deserves to be another. The automobile industry, from the first models, due to the natural lack of skill of users and technology, left victims in the same proportion as the number of cars on the streets increased. Things only got better with equipment rules and the improvement of laws and traffic structure. Much of it was demanded by society, which defended itself via the government or legal proceedings. So it was with diesel gate, which marks the beginning of the current period of decline in the sector, surpassed precisely by technology companies. It is now their turn.

UNFORTUNATELY

"The commander said that Lula's victory was unwanted in the Army and unfortunately it happened." Folha's headline reproduces expressions used by General Tomás Miguel Miné Ribeiro Paiva in conversation with subordinates leaked by God knows who. "Undesired" and "unfortunately" also make up the lead of the article.

The problem, readers have noted, is that the Army commander didn't just say that. He also declared that the result of the election needed to be accepted, that the same polls had chosen governors and a conservative Congress, that the Forces verified that there had been no fraud, and that, if they, in uniform, live in a right-wing bubble, it was important to recognize that "there's another bubble, and it's not a small one." One reader perceived the newspaper's statement as misleading, given that the army member's speech was a clear attempt to calm tempers.

So did the editorial "A good definition of courage", by O Estado de S.Paulo, published on Thursday (2). The statement alludes to another sentence by Tomás Paiva, "courage is to remain a State institution", and the article classifies the explanation as "deeply democratic". There is also a jab at those who took the statements out of context to "make it seem" that there was personal resistance from the military to Lula. The shoe was a great fit for Folha, obviously.

Competition aside, the newspaper should have weighed in its title the commander's lament and the important defense he made of the elections, making the news edition more informative and balanced. The country already has enough commotion as it is, it doesn't need any more of it.

_{Translated by Cassy Dias}