RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian authorities, grappling with a torrent of online misinformation ahead of the country’s presidential election, granted the nation’s elections chief unilateral power to order tech companies to remove many online posts and videos — one of the most aggressive actions taken by any country to combat false information.
Under the rules passed on Thursday, the elections chief can order the immediate removal of content that he believes has violated previous orders. Social networks must comply with the election chief’s takedown orders within two hours or face potential suspension of their services in Brazil.
The move culminates an increasingly assertive strategy by election officials in Brazil to crack down on the misinformation that has flooded the country’s presidential race in recent days, including claims that candidates are Satanists, cannibals and pedophiles.
But by allowing a single person to decide what can be said online in the run-up to the high-stakes election, which will be held on Oct. 30, Brazil has made itself a test case in a swelling debate over how far to go in fighting “fake news.”
The decision drew outcry from supporters of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, as well as concern from many internet-law and civil-rights experts, who said it represented a potentially dangerous, authoritarian expansion of power, one that could be abused to censor legitimate viewpoints and swing the presidential contest.
The elections chief, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, is already at the center of a separate fight over the increasing authority of Brazil’s highest court. He has ordered investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and jailed some of his supporters for what Mr. Moraes said were attacks on the nation’s democratic institutions.
“It’s a risky move,” Carlos Affonso Souza, a professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, said of Thursday’s decision. “I think it could go too far depending on how he exercises these rights.”
Still, the move was cheered by others in Brazil, including many on the left, who see it as a necessary tool to fight an avalanche of false claims from Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters that has only accelerated in recent days.
During Thursday’s vote on the rules, Mr. Moraes said complaints about misinformation had increased nearly 17-fold compared with past elections.
“There has been proliferation of not only false news, but of the aggressiveness of this news, this hate speech, which we all know leads to nothing but an erosion of democracy,” he said. “This is precisely why we need a faster way.”
Mr. Bolsonaro faces off on Oct. 30 against the leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a vote that is widely regarded as Brazil’s most important in decades.
Under the new rules, which were passed unanimously by the seven federal judges who make up Brazil’s electoral court, the elections chief’s expanded powers are effective during election campaigns. The powers will lapse after the presidential vote, but will take effect again in future campaigns.
The rules allow Mr. Moraes to order social networks to immediately take down content that he determines has violated previous decisions by the broader electoral court.
The electoral court has already banned posts that call Mr. Bolsonaro a pedophile, a claim that accelerated in recent days after video emerged of the president saying “there was a spark” between him and two teenage girls. The court has also ordered the takedown of content that says Mr. da Silva is corrupt. Mr. da Silva served time in prison on corruption charges, which were later nullified.
André Spigariol contributed reporting from Brasília.
