00:00And as Election Day approaches in Brazil, Thursday marks the final date of campaign advertising through traditional media.
00:07Our colleague Brian Meir is live in Sao Paulo and has all the details of today's events.
00:11Welcome, Brian, to From the South.
00:14Hi, thanks for having me.
00:16Well, as you just mentioned, the attacks by the U.S. government against Brazil's court system
00:24are directly related to these kinds of processes which are underway today, governed by Brazil's unique and innovated superior electoral
00:34court system,
00:35which has several Supreme Court justices as its members.
00:39According to Brazil's tight election laws, today is the last day that campaign commercials can run.
00:46And Brazil has a system set up in which every political party that fields a candidate
00:51gets a certain amount of free airtime and a certain amount of government financial assistance to produce these ads.
01:00The amount of airtime depends on how many members of Congress that party has.
01:07And in the case of small parties, especially these radical left parties like the UP or the PSTU,
01:13which have no representation in Congress, they still get a small amount of airtime.
01:18So in recent years, the effects of this have diminished because of social media.
01:24But the law is that starting after tonight, nobody can run any more campaign commercials.
01:30Meanwhile, every step of the way, the U.S. government is trying to undermine Brazil's campaign laws.
01:37The U.S. government and the private sector, Facebook, has been outed by two different international organizations,
01:43Amnesty International and Echo, for allowing illegal campaign ads to appear on its social media platforms posted from other countries,
01:53which is also a crime.
01:55We see this year that artificial intelligence is becoming a factor in elections for the first time ever.
02:01And like most places in the world, the government regulatory atmosphere is not catching up with it on time to
02:08stop its worst abuses.
02:10But in the case of Brazil, it's even worse because the U.S. government and Silicon Valley is deliberately trying
02:15to undermine the legitimacy of the court system
02:19that is supposed to defend Brazil's democracy against these foreign imperialist attacks.
02:25So today is the last day in which the ads are officially running, but we can expect some kind of
02:33illegal activity continuing on social media
02:36sponsored by bad faith foreign actors, including billionaires who have been trying to undermine Brazil's court system now for seven
02:46or eight years.
02:55So October 4th is going to be a real test of how strong Brazil's regulatory system remains under confronted with
03:06all of these foreign attacks underway.
03:10Thank you very much, Ryan, for the detailed information coming on this as we're getting closer to the election day
03:16and the current circumstances surrounding the electoral,
03:18especially with the foreign interference coming from the U.S. and other sectors.
03:23Thank you for sharing with us.
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