Brazil hits Discord and TikTok in back-to-back child safety crackdown

Brazil’s government filed a civil collective moral damages lawsuit against Discord seeking 500 million reais, roughly $97 million, over what it says are failures to comply with laws protecting children and women, per Reuters.

Solicitor General Jorge Messias announced the action Wednesday. It follows an order this month from the National Data Protection Authority requiring Discord to suspend livestreams and video calls in Brazil, issued after a 13-year-old girl died by suicide following a broadcast in which authorities say she was encouraged to harm herself.

Discord filed an appeal against that suspension on Monday, which the agency told AFP is under review.

Brazil is using the courts to go beyond the regulator’s penalty cap

The lawsuit exceeds what the regulator itself could impose. The data protection agency launched its probe in early August upon recommendation by the Digital Rights Secretariat and gave Discord five days to show how it protects children and teenagers, with penalties of up to 50 million reais if it fails, MLex reports.

It ordered the suspension on August 12 and Discord complied on August 17, saying it was seeking a solution that would let the features return. Going to court for ten times the administrative maximum is how the government reaches past its own regulator.

TikTok was hit with a $30 million child-data fine the day before

The Discord suit arrived into a week of enforcement. On Tuesday the authority fined TikTok 153.7 million reais, close to $30 million, for irregularities in processing the data of children and adolescents, and ordered ByteDance to delete data collected in breach of the rules, per AFP.

The regulator estimated that the company might have processed data from as many as 8 million children and cited flaws in the process of age verification. TikTok has 10 days to appeal, and the company has said that it will be complying with new rules that include tougher default privacy settings for under-16s, increased parental controls, and enhanced content filtering.

The company agreed last week to pay $400 million to settle a separate US Justice Department case over children’s privacy.

Twenty-two platforms are now under scrutiny as enforcement widens

Agency director Lorena Giuberti Coutinho said proceedings began last week to check whether 22 social media networks and platforms comply with a child protection law Brazil passed this year, which requires accounts belonging to users under 16 to be linked to a parent’s and obliges platforms to verify ages.

I think we can expect much stronger enforcement action in the months ahead.

– Lorena Giuberti Coutinho

Brazil has moved against large platforms before. X was blocked for 40 days in 2024 until it complied with Supreme Court orders to remove accounts accused of spreading disinformation.

Separately, the consumer rights group Collective Defense Institute is seeking 3 billion reais from the Brazilian units of TikTok, Kwai and Meta over minors’ use of their services.

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