Pedro Innecco

I was quite happy to see in the news today that Brazil tops the world rank of countries asking Google to remove content (Reuters) (Google Blog).

Right now one might be wondering if I am a fascist or a communist, or some sort of enemy of the free world. No, not at all. In fact on the contrary.

Back in 2008, I wrote a post condemning Google’s nonchalant attitude towards what users do when using their services. I read a bunch of articles about this new announcement by Google, and some of them seems to me to be a bit (well, way) out of line. Particularly this one which says that “Brazil’s 3,663 data requests and 291 removal requests [...] underscores Brasília’s restriction of free speech”. According to articles like this; racism, pedophilia and cyber bullying are the same as freedom of speech (if citing Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

Funny, it have The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) right in front of me, and according to this document, the author of this article is wrong. In fact, he is full of bull. This is yet another case (as I did before) of citing Article 30 of the UDHR:

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Basically Article 30 asserts this isn’t the “world of do as you please regardless of others by saying you have the right to do so because of the UDHR”, like many people (including many at Google, as per my previous article) seem to claim.

And I am proud to see that the Brazilian government seems to be on pair with the UDHR. Is targeting pedophilia a violation of free speech? No, because paedophilia is abusing the human rights of its victims, thus it is against the UDHR. Is targeting racist websites and pages in Orkut (Google’s social platform, mostly popular in Brazil) a violation of free speech? No, because racism is against the UDHR (Articles 2, 3 and 5 just to name a few). Is targeting cyber bullying (Article 12)… You get the idea – so I hope.

Kudos to the Brazilian government for sending the right message to Google and the rest of the world. We shall defend the UDHR in its entirely (and not just what is convenient to a few) along with our constitution.