Braziltopia

Australia's Labor government opened a public consultation on Tuesday (Sept. 8) on legislation that would require the big platforms to give social media users the option to switch off algorithmic recommendations and see only posts from friends, creators and other accounts they have chosen to follow. Companies that violate the package, called the Digital Duty of Care, could face fines of up to 109.2 million Australian dollars, about $79 million. The feed requirement is nicknamed My Feed, My Way.Under the proposal, announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, platforms would have to explain how the default feed is assembled and notify new and existing users about the choice. Today, anyone opening Instagram, TikTok or YouTube gets a display case arranged by an algorithm, a system that logs likes, pauses and videos watched to guess what holds each person's attention, then serves more of it. It works like a supermarket that rearranges its aisles on every visit based on where the shopper stops. The Australian option would give users back fixed shelves: only what the accounts they follow have posted.The package also expands the powers of eSafety, Australia's online safety regulator, which could demand the rapid removal of harmful or illegal content, including nudity. Free speech advocates say the expansion opens the door to censorship. "This is not about giving control to government. It is about giving control to people," Albanese replied, calling the reform "sensible, pragmatic and practical", according to G1."The bill will ensure that online service providers, including some of the most powerful companies in the world, take responsibility and do more to keep Australians safe from harm on their platforms."Those words are from Communications Minister Anika Wells. The duty of care also covers online games, apps and artificial intelligence chatbots, which would have to protect users under 18 from potentially addictive design features or features that harm self-esteem, and to prevent children and teenagers from seeing content that promotes eating disorders, hostility toward women, pornography, the glorification of crime or harassment. The proposal follows Australia's ban, in force since late 2025, on social media accounts for children under 16, with age verification made the platforms' own responsibility. Meta declined to comment and TikTok and Snap did not respond to requests, according to a Bloomberg report published by InfoMoney. The announcement comes a month after Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle lawsuits by US states over the effects of social media on teenagers.Why the platforms will resistThe business model explains the friction. Platforms sell advertising priced by attention, and the recommendation engine is the machine that manufactures attention by endlessly serving whatever is best at holding each user. The European experience shows the size of the resistance. Since 2024, the EU's Digital Services Act has required platforms to offer users a way to opt out of profile-based personalized recommendations, and regulators have said some companies made that option hard to reach. According to Folha, which carried a report from the Financial Times, Wells argues the Australian design would go further: it would place on companies the obligation to guarantee users the right to refuse algorithmic feeds, instead of only offering an alternative. "There is a global shift toward governments seeking to empower users and offer more control over how they interact with digital services, including the ability to limit personalization features," Ewan Lusty, a partner at consultancy Flint Global, told Bloomberg.What we still do not knowThe text is under consultation and can change. The government wants to hear from technology companies, industry groups and civil society organizations before sending the bill to Parliament, expected later this year. Implementation details, such as deadlines and enforcement, have not been defined. For now, nothing changes for users outside Australia. Watch the final shape of the algorithm-free option, and whether it will be easy to find or buried in deep menus, as happened in Europe. A practical test today: look in your app's settings for a non-personalized feed switch. Whoever finds it already knows the format Australia wants to make mandatory.

On the screen of a phone, an 82-year-old woman watches a man in a white coat speak with confidence about remedies and cures. The voice is steady and the advice sounds reasonable. "I didn't realize it was artificial intelligence. I thought it was a real doctor, because what he said seemed plausible," she told BBC News Brasil. The doctor on screen, however, does not exist: the face, the voice and the coat were manufactured by artificial intelligence.That scene is what the Brazilian federal government has now moved against. The Advocacia-Geral da Uniao (AGU), the office that represents the federal state in court, notified YouTube on Friday (4 September) to remove or flag videos that use artificial intelligence to create fake doctors and other health professionals spreading misleading claims, such as promises of cures and scientifically unproven treatments. The platform has 72 hours to make the contents identified by the Ministry of Health unavailable or, depending on the case, to adopt labels and warnings making clear that the characters are artificial. The notification draws on an analysis by the ministry's Saude com Ciencia (Health with Science) program, which identified 97 profiles publishing this type of content between January 1 and July 10. The material was also sent to the Federal Police and to the Conselho Federal de Medicina (CFM), Brazil's national medical council.According to the ministry, the videos present human-looking avatars who introduce themselves as doctors or specialists, carry fictitious professional credentials and rely on alarmist language to build credibility. Some of the profiles target older Brazilians specifically and use the characters' supposed authority to sell products, e-books and paid services. The ministry warns that such content can lead to self-medication, use of therapies with no proven efficacy and delays in seeking professional care, including patients interrupting or replacing prescribed treatments. YouTube was also urged to review the other channels and videos named in the report under its own rules on health misinformation and synthetic content.An industry at scaleThe notification comes two months after BBC News Brasil exposed an industry of channels built on these characters. The July investigation mapped 29 Portuguese-language channels devoted to AI fake doctors with more than 70 million combined views, based on data from the nonprofit CTRL+Z, and counted roughly ten new videos per day. In about 27,000 comments, the BBC found accounts from older viewers who said they had followed the advice, including people who replaced prescribed medication with foods, plants and home remedies. Contacted at the time, Google removed some of the largest channels in the survey, with about 41 million combined views, and said all AI-generated content must follow guidelines that ban medical misinformation capable of causing serious real-world harm. Other videos remained online, and the BBC says it is still waiting for a response from the company on the new notification.When the face belongs to a real doctorA second BBC report showed that at least five channels used, without authorization, the face and identity of otolaryngologist Helio Brasileiro to recommend supposed natural treatments and make alarming health claims. He discovered the clones when he saw his own image in the first BBC report, complained to YouTube and filed a police report with the civil police of Sao Paulo state. The case is being investigated by the 3rd police district of Sorocaba, which is weighing possible offenses including ideological falsehood, false identity, false alarm and attempted defamation. In her order, delegate Alessandra Silveira wrote that spreading medical disinformation through biometric simulation demanded immediate police action and could create a risk of poisoning or self-medication.The notification to YouTube is part of a task force that includes the Ministry of Health, the AGU and the presidential communications office. The ministry recommends that Brazilians check health guidance against official sources and report content that could put other people at risk. For the 82-year-old woman who believed in the doctor on her screen, what remains is a warning that should have arrived sooner: that doctor never existed.