Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has big plans to kill online anonymity, and his wife wants to ban Discord. Last week, Lula signed a “child-protection” law that turns the use of certain anonymization tools into an aggravating factor in crimes against children and permits files that are shared on peer-to-peer networks to be tracked without so much as a judge’s order.
At the same ceremony in the Presidential Palace, the First Lady, Janja da Silva, said Brazil needs to take messaging and voice platform Discord "off the air.” The attorney general went as far as saying he would go to court to have the platform removed.
The quotes here are translated from Portuguese.
Janja da Silva is the president's wife and holds no office that can remove a platform, but that didn’t stop her from calling the shots. "We need to take Discord off the air immediately. We need to block Discord in Brazil by any means," she said, literally turning to the justice minister to ask what legal measures existed that could get it done. The attorney general, Jorge Messias, said he would file a public civil action against Discord asking for "the immediate accountability and the removal of its use by Brazilian society."
If Discord was banned, millions of people who did nothing wrong and committed no crime would lose a place to communicate, and switching off a service because a crime was reportedly committed on it is beyond what a government gets to do in a free society.
Thankfully, a court has already refused to do it. Victor Fernandes, the Justice Ministry's secretary of digital rights, said police asked to suspend Discord and the judge denied the request. Interestingly, the officials pressing for the Discord ban have said nothing about what banning Discord would prevent.
All of this is happening following the tragic death of a 13-year-old girl in Naviraí, in Mato Grosso do Sul, who died by suicide during a live stream last month, allegedly after a group of kids told her to.
Police are holding five adolescents aged between 13 and 17 and have arrested an 18-year-old man. Those held or arrested also happened to have been using Telegram alongside Discord, and Fernandes said both platforms had broken Brazil's digital laws. However, it’s only Discord that has faced demands to be pulled offline.
As you might expect, following recent global trends, the remedy one official reached for was digital ID age verification. Fernandes said Discord didn’t check users' ages at all. Since the spring, however, Discord has asked users to confirm their age with a face scan or by showing a government ID to reach adult content. What’s on offer now is more identity-checking.
The new law is the bigger story, and it was actually moving along before the girl’s suicide. Numbered PL 3066/2025, it cleared the Chamber of Deputies on May 19 and passed the Senate.
Brazil's Internet Steering Committee, CGI.br, had asked Lula to veto the anonymization provision, article 226-A. He signed it anyway. In a public note, the committee expressed concern that the article's broad wording, which covers everything from proxies and any technique for masking or altering an IP address (like VPNs), "as an indicator of unlawful behavior." It could "open a regulatory precedent for casting suspicion on whoever uses privacy tools." It added that the heavier penalty only applies once an investigation has already identified the suspect, so it "does not improve the technical capacity of authorities to trace such crimes."
It’s important to add here that the law's text protects “legitimate” use, and it doesn’t make VPNs illegal. But who’s to decide what’s legitimate and what’s not? Treating standard privacy tools as something that deepens guilt sets the premise that the tool itself is suspect and that precedent then becomes available for the next law to borrow.
Not only would this affect everyday privacy-conscious citizens, but it would also harm journalists, abuse victims, and anyone whose safety depends on not being traced, and lean hardest on these tools.
The second provision, known as the "virtual patrol" (ronda virtual), gives police and prosecutors the power to obtain connection and registration data straight from providers without a prior court order, as long as a judge is notified within 48 hours. For now, it applies to cases of “flagrante delicto” (where someone is in the very act of committing the offense) or a risk to a child's life, and the data may be used only in that investigation. Its backers cite an October ruling by the Superior Court of Justice upholding the tracking of files shared openly on P2P networks.
A warrant requirement is supposed to exist to put a judge between the state and a person's data before that data is taken. Under this new premise, though, the judge hears of it two days later, and by then there is nothing left to guard.
As of this writing, Messias had not filed his action against Discord.
