A Brazilian court on Wednesday ordered Facebook to remove “false information’’ related to slain politician Marielle Franco within 24 hours.
Facebook must “use all the available instruments to prevent the publication of new offensive posts’’ on Franco, the court statement quoted judge, Jorge Novelle, as saying.
Franco’s sister and her partner had lodged a complaint against Facebook for spreading false and slanderous information about the popular counselor and human rights activist, who was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro on March 14.
Posts on Facebook had claimed that Franco, who comes from one of Rio’s poorest neighborhoods, had links with “bandits’’ and drug traffickers.
Before her death, Franco criticised a recent government decision to make the army responsible for security in crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro state.
Her killing brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets.
“It is not to be tolerated that the death of Marielle, martyr of contemporary history in Brazil, should be repeated day by day’’ by spreading “slander against the dead, hatred, racial and gender prejudice and abuse’’ on social media, Novelle said.
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The court did not say how it would penalize Facebook if the social media company did not comply with the order.
Facebook is also involved in a data privacy scandal.
The killing of Franco is seen as part of a mounting wave of political violence in Brazil, where former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s campaign buses were fired on late Tuesday.
Lula was on neither of the two buses traveling in southern Parana state, and there were no injuries.
President Michel Temer said that “this wave of violence’’ could not continue and that it was necessary to “pacify the country.’’
Lula, a former trade unionist, who held the presidency from 2003 to 2011, is campaigning for the Oct. 7 presidential elections in spite a corruption conviction that could soon land him in jail.
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