Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) (AFP) – The Brazilian government on Wednesday said it was suing the Discord messaging platform for nearly $100 million in damages over its alleged failure to protect children from harmful content and demanded it adopt stronger safeguards. Brazil’s National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) ordered Discord to suspend livestreams earlier this month after a 13-year-old girl was goaded into killing herself during a livestream.
A government statement said the lawsuit filed Tuesday in the capital, Brasilia, was brought after failed negotiations with Discord, whose proposals were “deemed insufficient to eliminate the identified risks.” “The lawsuit seeks to compel the Discord platform to adopt effective measures to protect children, adolescents, and women in the digital environment,” said the statement. “It also requests that the company be ordered to pay R$ 500 million ($97 million) in compensation for collective moral damages.”
The messaging platform, with over 90 million active daily users, agreed to suspend livestreaming in Brazil on August 17, assuring it was working “to make Discord safer for teens.” However, Brasilia said it “continues to exhibit flaws in its age verification and user protection mechanisms,” exposing users to serious risks, such as those that resulted in the girl’s death in July. Five teenagers and an adult have been arrested in connection with the suicide in a small town in central-western Brazil.
Over 45 minutes, the teens allegedly encouraged the girl to kill an animal, and when she failed to do so, they encouraged her to kill herself, according to an official with the Justice Ministry’s Ciberlab intelligence unit. One of the teens arrested was just 14. Brazil is demanding that Discord implement stricter parental controls, cooperate more closely with the authorities, and implement systems capable of detecting and preventing situations that put minors at risk.
In a blog post earlier this month, Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy assured that the company was working “to make Discord safer for teens.”
Brazil has taken a tough stance against social media platforms, cracking down on disinformation and requiring users under 16 to have their accounts linked to those of their parents. On Tuesday, the ANPD fined TikTok nearly $30 million for failing to implement child safety measures in what it said was a “powerful signal” to social media companies. ANPD director Lorena Giuberti Coutinho said the agency last week initiated proceedings to verify the compliance of 22 social media networks and platforms with a law passed this year to protect children and teens online.
“I think we can expect much stronger enforcement action” in coming months, she said. Brazil’s Supreme Court has also locked horns with Big Tech, specifically Elon Musk’s X, over online disinformation. Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes has been accused by the Brazilian and American right of censorship for, among other things, blocking access to X for 40 days in 2024.
© 2024 AFP
