Haddad says the government needs to improve communication to face the rise of the far right and warns: ‘it will be a long winter’

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247 – The Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, said that the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) is facing difficulties with regard to communication and combating fake news and that the government seeks to find a “democratic way out” to curb the dissemination of misinformation and hate speech on social media.

“We want a democratic way out of the problem. We don’t want an authoritarian way out. There are countries that adopt authoritarian solutions. Prohibit [o funcionamento das plataformas] and it’s over. We want to protect the individual from an avalanche of misinformation that offends his reputation and against which he has no protection,” Haddad told Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.

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“I agree with the critics who say that we are still very analogue on social media. The fight against fake news is still a problem for us. I sometimes receive reports of [publicações em] networks. The degree of misinformation is very large”, observed Haddad.

“We also have to better calibrate our communication, our speeches. We need to learn to deal with this rise of the extreme right. It will be a long cycle, a long winter. The extreme right is not episodic. It may even last for a short time over the course of the History. But at the cost of a lot of destruction sometimes,” he said.

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Still according to him, “when you have a center-left party on one side and a center-right party on the other, there is parity of weapons. With the extreme right there is no parity. That is the truth. There is no protection. It uses tools that are not from our culture.”

The minister also highlighted that “President Lula is rebuilding a lot of things that were in decomposition. There is an effort to reorganize the State and public policies that is remarkable. The Ministry of the Environment was liquidated, the Ministry of Health was denialist, Science and Technology was in disarray. There are also institutions. I don’t want to live in a dictatorship. Maybe everything we are doing doesn’t appear at first. But it wasn’t exactly a Bolsonaro government that preceded us. Legislative and did not govern”.