Brasília (AFP) – Popular messaging platform Discord said Monday it had complied with a Brazilian government order to suspend livestreaming and video calls in the country after a teen girl was allegedly goaded into taking her own life during a broadcast. Brazil’s National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) had ordered the US-based tech company to suspend livestreams on August 12, saying it had failed to put safeguards in place to protect children. The agency had given Discord a deadline of Monday night to comply.
“We’re complying with the order and working with the ANPD in good faith, which means that screen sharing and video calls will be unavailable for Brazilian users starting now,” Stanislav Vishnevskiy, the company’s co-founder, said in a blog post. Five teenagers and an adult have been arrested in connection with the death of the 13-year-old girl in a small town in western central Brazil. One police officer described her death a “real-life horror show.”
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. In his post, Vishnevskiy claimed that Discord was not the only platform involved, saying that the “coordinated sadistic harm campaign… was carried out across multiple platforms.”
“We are working hard to restore access to these important features as quickly as possible,” he wrote, assuring that the company was working “to make Discord safer for teens.” Users in Brazil can, meanwhile, continue to access audio calls and direct messages, among other tools. When it ordered the suspension, the ANPD said that “livestreams have been repeatedly used to facilitate violence, harassment, and the incitement of self-harm and suicide,” and cited “robust evidence that the company failed to adopt reasonable measures.”
Discord, at the time, said it was “disappointed” by the directive and that it rejected the agency’s “characterization” of the platform. It said it had taken down the invitation-only group accused in the case.
– A ‘big joke’ – Globally, Discord claims more than 90 million active daily users. Rosangela da Silva, wife of left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, called for the platform to be shut down and urged “the judiciary to remove this horrible network from the Internet.” Some Brazilian users reacted indignantly to the suspension of livestreaming.
“Here in Brazil they allow mobile phones in prisons. This Discord case is a big joke,” one user posting as Stupid Luh wrote. Latin America’s biggest economy has in recent months sought to boost protections for children online, obliging platforms to link the accounts of users under age 16 to their parents’ accounts and verify user age. The country’s Supreme Court has also taken the fight to online disinformation. Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes has become a hated figure for the right in Brazil and the United States for, among other things, blocking access to X for 40 days in 2024.
© 2024 AFP
