Brazil's Internet Steering Committee, the CGI.br, released on Thursday (17) a guide with 46 guidelines for regulating social media in the country. The document, titled 46 Guidelines for the Regulation of Social Media Platforms, is the product of a year of work and has no force of law: it works as a reference manual for Congress, the courts and regulators as they draft or enforce rules for platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X.
The CGI.br is the multistakeholder body that helps govern the Brazilian internet, with seats for government, business, nonprofits and the scientific and technical community. The guide follows up on 10 regulatory principles the committee published in August 2025 and draws on two public consultations, including one in 2023 that gathered more than a thousand responses. The launch took place at an event in São Paulo, according to the trade outlet Convergência Digital.
What the guide asks for
The guidelines are organized in six thematic areas. On sovereignty and national jurisdiction, the text recommends that foreign platforms keep legal representation or an office in Brazil whenever they offer service to the Brazilian public, taking into account the volume of local users, commercial ties and the availability of content in Portuguese (guideline 1). It also calls for measures to detect and mitigate undue interference in electoral and democratic processes, including fighting mass messaging and banning the monetization or boosting of anti-democratic content (guideline 4).
On transparency, companies would have to publish their internal moderation rules and removal metrics, say whether takedowns were triggered by automation or user complaints, and prove they have human moderation teams versed in Brazilian Portuguese and local context (guideline 6). The guide also recommends labeling synthetic content generated by artificial intelligence (guideline 11). On the economy, it proposes limits on self-preferencing by dominant platforms, which could not abusively push their own products in search results and feeds (guideline 15), and endorses interoperability between services, the same logic that lets you email someone on a different provider without changing your address (guideline 24). On human rights, it asks for tests and audits against algorithmic discrimination to avoid racial, gender or social bias, and fair compensation for the use of journalistic content. According to the CGI.br itself, the document also covers civil liability and limits on the use of AI.
Two ideas run through all 46 guidelines: asymmetric regulation and proportionality. Think of how health inspectors treat food: a street stall and a food multinational both sell meals, but the second answers to far stricter rules. The guide sets tougher duties for the big platforms, described as systemically relevant actors, while trying not to squeeze out small providers, community networks and startups.
Why platforms will resist
Most of the guidelines touch the engine of the business. Large platforms earn money from attention time and advertising, and opaque recommendation systems plus closed ecosystems are what keep users inside. Demanding moderation transparency, labeling synthetic content and opening the walls with interoperability changes that model. For Marie Santini, head of the NetLab lab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the urgency lies elsewhere: as reported by Jornal Nacional, she argues that election campaigns, markets and government communication now run through these platforms, and that "the ones who decide who has freedom of expression are them, because these companies moderate content however they want".
CGI.br coordinator Renata Mielli noted that the decisive step is still missing: turning the guide into law. "We still need a legal framework approved by the National Congress, one that represents the common denominator of the views of the different segments of Brazilian society," she told Jornal Nacional. The document lands weeks before Brazil's presidential election in October, when the campaigns themselves rely on these platforms to reach voters.
The guide also connects with the Digital ECA, Brazil's law protecting children and teenagers online, in force for six months. According to Rodrigo Nejm, a digital education specialist at the Alana Institute, the law bans commercial profiling of minors, but "this needs to be implemented, supervised and punished", and without transparency from the platforms there is no way to know whether the rule is being enforced.
What we still do not know: whether Congress will turn the guidelines into law, in an election year when any bill about social media becomes a political fight; how the platforms will respond, legally or commercially; and what the CGI.br's full report, promised for the end of the year, will detail about the methodology behind the guide.
In practice, watch three fronts: bills in Congress that cite the document, the CGI.br methodology report, and the arrival of synthetic content labels in your feed. If AI labels start showing up in your favorite app, or if a regulation bill borrows the guidelines' numbering, that is the sign the guide is moving off the page.