Twitter rejects Brazilian government request to remove posts calling for attacks on schools

In a meeting that flared over the platform’s radical stance, Twitter denied the Brazilian government’s request to remove posts that encourage attacks on schools and expose the victims of this violence. The meeting took place this Monday in Brasilia, with Justice Minister Flavio Dino and social media adviser Stela Aragna attending, who were outraged.

The lawyer representing Twitter was adamant in defending the platform’s autonomy to determine its own content display policy and refused all requests from Brazil to remove from the air photos of victims of attacks on schools, images of killers who committed bloody acts in educational institutions, as well as messages encouraging this kind of violence.

Ever since multimillionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed all the rules of the platform, it has been very hard for the Brazilian authorities to count on the network’s cooperation to eliminate hate-promoting posts.

At a meeting in Brasilia attended by representatives of other platforms that have pledged to remove hate content from their networks, the Minister of Justice and Public Safety asked everyone to remove about 400 messages that encourage or may encourage extremist attacks on schools and cause more deaths of innocent people.

Only Twitter refused, and a spokesperson for the platform, according to the tense meeting, went so far as to say that showing images of killers or bloodied victims, in her opinion, does not lead anyone to commit such crimes.

Attacks on schools are experiencing a frightening increase in Brazil, and in the past two weeks alone, they have already caused five deaths and 16 injuries, three of which were teenagers.

In the fourth, committed by a 25-year-old man last week in a kindergarten in the tourist town of Blumenau, four children were killed with an ax and four others were seriously injured.