Brazil Twitter Files - Part 2
The influencer uses his influence - by Eli Vieira, (@EliVieiraJr, X.com)
by Eli Vieira, @EliVieiraJr, X.com; tanslated from Portuguese by Reverso.net
Felipe Neto Rodrigues Vieira is an important name in the Brazilian public space since he ascended on YouTube in the early 2010s criticizing the musical taste of adolescents and using very harsh words against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Workers Party. In an ideological turn, Lula’s election became the subject of the 2022 race, which led the PT to the third term as president.
This realignment culminated in the invitation of the Lula government for Felipe Neto to join a working group of the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship in February 2023, dedicated to "fighting hate speech and extremism", with a special focus on regulating social networks. The same month, Felipe spoke to Unesco about the same topic. The group was dubbed the "Ministry of Truth" by government critics.
Neto is the founder of the Vero Institute, an NGO partner of the TSE’s Disinformation Coping Program. The institution also sponsored events held by the TSE against misinformation.
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We (@shellenberger, @david_agape_, and myself) are revealing today that Felipe Neto had privileged access to Twitter, to the point that a senior employee proposed a private conversation between him and Yoel Roth, then head of social network security. This invitation was made in the context of the sanctions imposed by the moderation of Twitter content on journalist Allan dos Santos, now exiled in the United States, protected by the broader standard of freedom of expression of that country.
Head of public policy at Twitter asks the head of security special attention to Allan dos Santos and meeting with Felipe Neto
On June 14, 2021, the then head of public policy at Twitter, Fernando Gallo (who now holds a similar position in the Brazilian office of the social network TikTok), sent an email to Yoel Roth, head of social network security. The subject: Gallo asked Roth in person to investigate journalist Allan dos Santos’s Twitter account in a "holistic" way. The journalist "has been very problematic for us in Brazil" and increasingly complicated to deal with, Gallo commented, detailing that Santos "insists on posting very controversial things about Covid and other abusive content".
Gallo wanted Roth - involved in the decision to ban Donald Trump’s account - to permanently ban Santos' account and to change his mind about keeping a tweet on the air where the journalist "speculated about someone’s state of health, making a connection between a vaccine and health problems, thus creating doubts about the safety of the vaccine," in the words of the head of public policies of the social network. The issue is not new in Twitter Files: in the United States, the social network has collaborated with the government and think tanks to remove content critical to the policies of confronting the pandemic, which in the country violates the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Fernando Gallo’s email
Roth’s decision not to delete Santos' tweet greatly angered Felipe Neto, who at the time cultivated an image of a supporter of lockdowns and other sanitary measures. As a "request number 2", in the same email, Gallo said that the YouTuber "has been an antagonist and opponent of the current government" of Jair Bolsonaro and "a strong critic of Twitter for what he considers leniency on our part in applying our rules on Covid". In other words, Felipe Neto was pushing for a tougher approach to content removal.
"He is very angry," Gallo said, referring to Neto, "and getting louder and louder, to the point of starting to tweet about his conversations with us". There is, therefore, a suggestion of privileged influencer access to lobby their causes within Twitter, in the form of private conversations that Gallo feared would be exposed.
Gallo then invited Roth to another conversation with Neto: "Although there are some risks, we and the communications team wanted to see if you would be open to an off-the-record conversation with him, to make him feel like he was heard" and "hopefully, tensions will settle down a bit".
Fernando Gallo’s email, 2nd part
Yoel Roth accepts the invitation and analyzes in detail the tweet of Allan dos Santos
With a copy for legal director Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth responded six hours later. "The easy answer first: I would be happy to talk to Felipe Neto," Twitter’s head of integrity said. "We will follow in a separate thread [of messages] regarding the logistics of this, but if you tell me that this is a high-value conversation for me to participate, I do it with pleasure," he added, adding a smile symbol.
Yoel Roth’s email
In the same message of 2021, Roth then studies in detail the case of Allan dos Santos. He admits that the case was "a mess" because the content moderation team, using a system of "tickets" (as is done in customer service on websites), miscounted the number of violations of Santos.
About the tweet whose online permanence angered Felipe Neto, Roth gave the context that the publication referred to the cardiac arrest that the Danish football player Christian Eriksen suffered on June 12, 2021, two days before the exchange of messages. Roth said that "the whole narrative" about the cardiac arrest was "challenging". "On the one hand, our policies do not cover speculation about the health status of individuals or potential individual side effects of vaccination," on the other hand, the player "was not vaccinated, so the tweet is misleading as to whether there is a possibility that vaccination could have contributed to the problem".
Allan dos Santos' publication would fall into a "gray area" because "the author speculates about blood clots and myocarditis (both narratives associated with Covid vaccines), but explicitly notes that there is no direct connection to the vaccine. It does not meet the strict criterion we have for incitement to fear based on an explicit false claim," explained Roth, who ends his analysis of the tweet by recommending applying a label on it and a suspension of the account because of the other violations. As I explained in Gazeta do Povo (in Portuguese), multiple studies point to myocarditis and blood clots as true side effects of vaccines, usually in low frequency, with risks ranging from vaccine to vaccine and by demographic group. The word "narrative", therefore, especially as a justification for sanctions to the expression of users on social networks, does not give the subject the deserved seriousness.
Yoel Roth expressed concern over the temporary judicial victory won by Allan dos Santos at the time against YouTube censorship. "I worry that the inherent disorder of this problem could make it a challenge to explain the basis of a suspension action if we did it now".
Yoel Roth’s email - 2nd part
Twitter legal team compares Allan dos Santos to Alex Jones
After internal discussions with Twitter’s legal team, the next day senior legal advisers Rafael Batista and Diego de Lima Gualda issued their opinion on Allan dos Santos and the proposed meeting with Felipe Neto. As suggested earlier by Gallo, Batista and Gualda agree that Allan dos Santos is comparable to Alex Jones, an American influencer later convicted in local justice, among other reasons, for saying that a gunman’s attack on the Sandy Hook school was a farce.
Experts recommended that it was best to let the violation counting system "run its course, especially as we have concerns in Brazil regarding litigation questioning account suspensions, given the consumer-friendly focus of local courts "that is, lower courts, which would tend to favor claimants and not the social network, on which they would impose "the burden of presenting copies of the infringing content in court".
Batista and Gualda accused Santos of manipulating the social network system with the intention of spreading misinformation, "but in a context in which, for some reason, we failed to strictly enforce relevant policies appropriately". For him, the journalist "includes in his most controversial tweets phrases with an air of speculation, when in fact they are disclosed on purpose to deceive". The consultants also expressed concern over Santos' victory over YouTube and what it meant for Twitter, which therefore had to give a strong ground of violation of the terms of service by punishing him.
Email signed by Rafael Batista and Diego de Lima Gualda
Finally, senior legal counsel proposed that Twitter could "take advantage" of Supreme Court rulings by global suspension of one of Allan dos Santos' accounts, as well as leverage "media materials" that corroborated "the conspiracy theorist profile" of the journalist. The experts also made indirect mention of taking advantage of CPI’s investigations of Covid against Santos, expressing distrust that he was already living in the United States for "defamation tourism" (libel Tourism), ie to escape the laws of his country of origin, and consider whether they could fit his behavior of creating new accounts as "bad faith in using the service". There is, however, a difference in the treatment of freedom of expression between the two countries, as Flavio Dino’s Ministry of Justice discovered in a meeting with the FBI in which a representative said that Allan dos Santos' alleged crimes were "just words"as reported by Folha de S. Paulo.
In fact, it was possible to take advantage later of decisions coming from the STF, as shown in an email from a lawyer from Twitter (not senior, so here anonymized), June 6, 2022, in which she told that Minister Alexandre de Moraes had ordered the suspension of six accounts of Allan dos Santos, in addition to the collection of data associated with them. Moraes also wanted monitoring to avoid creating new accounts. The lawyer did not question the order and said that "we will inform that if we identify any new related accounts, we will report them to the Supreme Court". To this day, Santos' accounts remain suspended in Brazil, despite the promise of Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), to reverse Moraes' orders. The same message includes the case of the censorship imposed by Moraes on the communist party PCO in the context of the Fake News Inquiry.
Twitter lawyer email kept anonymous
"Felipe Neto is someone we can not trust to keep conversations off"
Batista and Gualda ended their June 15, 2021 email recommending that Yoel Roth not meet Felipe Neto. The meeting "presents additional risks in our strategy", because "Felipe Neto is someone we can not completely trust to keep a conversation off" (out of the official records and the eyes of the public). The consultants warned that the influencer could try to take advantage of both the scenario of Allan dos Santos' ban and the permanence of the profile.
Email signed by Batista e Gualda - 2nd part
The two legal advisers expressed awareness that the meeting, should it happen, would create "an opportunity for any narrative claiming that Twitter is biased by opening a specific channel of communication with Felipe Neto who is not open 'to the other side', that Twitter is not consistently following its procedures/policies" instead "responding to pressure" from a famous user. They also warned that the meeting could be used by Allan dos Santos in court against them. "So, in our opinion, the risks of having this conversation with him [Neto] outweigh the potential benefits" concluded. As made clear in the initial message of Fernando Gallo, however, the communication channel with Felipe Neto was already open.
From the Twitter archives, it was not possible to determine whether the meeting between Yoel Roth and Felipe Neto happened.
The report talked to Allan dos Santos and contacted Felipe Neto, Gallo, Batista, and Gualda, who have not yet spoken. See the comment of Santos soon in the coverage of Gazeta do Povo.
header image credit: Marcio Menasce/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons