Brazil clamps down on social media after ‘epidemic’ of school attacks
- Websites will be ordered to take steps to ban content and users ‘promoting or supporting violence against schools’ or be fined or have their sites suspended
- New social media restrictions come one week after a hatchet-wielding assailant killed four children
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s justice minister, Flavio Dino, said that websites will be ordered to take steps to ban content and users who “are promoting or supporting attacks or violence against schools.”
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Grieving Brazilians bury child who was among 4 killed in nursery axe attack
Platforms that do not comply may be fined up to 12 million reais (US$2.4 million) and possibly have their sites suspended by federal authorities, the minister said.
Last Wednesday four children between four and seven years old were killed in a preschool in Blumenau, a city in southern Santa Catarina state, when a man carrying a hatchet stormed the facility.
The murders shocked the South American country, where two other attacks on schools – neither with fatalities – occurred on Monday and Tuesday.
“There is an emergency situation which has generated an epidemic of attacks, threats of attacks [and] panic among families and in schools,” said Dino, who vowed a “close regulation” of social media to contain the threats.