Adjudicating Fake News – Cornell International Law Journal

On July 30, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on imports from Brazil and sanctioned a sitting Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, both partially because of Brazil’s online content moderation decisions. This is an extreme, but not an isolated event: worldwide, legislators and regulators struggle to craft public policies that address problems of disinformation and online harassment while protecting the freedom of expression—leading to increasing international confrontations. One key question in content moderation is content adjudication—or who is responsible for deciding what type of speech violates the law and should be taken down (or not). This article contributes to this debate by presenting the results of a six-year, large empirical and qualitative project on the adjudication of fake news disputes by Brazilian Courts from 2018 onwards. It examines what led Brazilian judges to order

† Lancieri: Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center; Fellow, The
George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, UChicago Booth; Pereira
Neto: Professor of Law, FGV Direito SP. Coordinator of the Competition, Public Policy,
Innovation, and Technology (COMPPIT) Nucleus at FGV Direito SP. Partner at Pereira Neto,
Macedo, Rocco; Karolczak: PhD candidate in Political Sciences, University of Illinois at
Chicago; Marchiori de Assis: Research Fellow at the COMPPIT Nucleus, Senior Manager in
Cyber and Strategic Risk at Deloitte Italy, formerly at the Interamerican Development Bank
and the Organization of American States.
We would like to thank Stefan Bechtold, Anu Bradford, Eric Talley, Joshua Tucker,
William Hubbard, Amit Zac, Aniket Kesari, Chinmayi Sharma, Olivier Sylvain, Michael
Goodyear, Catherine Powell, Evelyn Douek, and participants at academic workshops and
conferences at Chicago, Columbia, ETH Zurich, FGV Direito Sao Paulo, Fordham, Georgetown,
Harvard, SciencesPo, Tilburg, the University of Zurich, and Yale for feedback on different
versions of this research.
The coding of the first round of disinformation decisions was carried out by the
Research Group on Competition Policy and Regulation of Digital Platforms at FGV Direito
SP between 2019 and 2022, with the collaboration of the following members: Antonio Bloch
Belizario; Daniel Favoretto Rocha; Esther Simon Seroussi Souccar; Fernanda Mascarenhas
Marques; Georges Vicentini El Hajj Moussa; Giulia de Paola; Helena Secaf dos Santos; Pedro
Marques Neto; Raíssa Leite de Freitas Paixão; and Vitória Oliveira. Antonio Bloch Belizario,
Helena Ambiel and Lucas Bertolo provided valuable research assistance regarding the 2022
elections and beyond. We are very thankful for their support.
According to the ASCOLA Declaration of Transparency and Disclosure, we report:
Lancieri: I worked on a CERRE-supported report on access to data and algorithms under the
DMA/DSA framework.
Pereira Neto: As a partner at Pereira Neto, Macedo, Rocco I advise digital platforms
such as Google, Airbnb, and Uber on matters relating to Brazilian antitrust and digital
regulations. These companies did not provide financial or material support nor were directly
involved in any stage of the drafting of this article.
Karolczak: Karolczak was part of a team that received an unconditional grant from
Facebook to develop the FGV/CEPI database of disinformation cases during the Brazilian
2018 elections, published in 2019. This article partially relies on that database.
Marchiori de Assis: nothing to disclose.