Company defends stance in spite of national law which bans campaign ads which offend political candidates

This article is more than 8 years old

This article is more than 8 years old

Police have detained Google's most senior executive in Brazil after the company failed to take down a YouTube video attacking a mayoral candidate in alleged violation of electoral law.

Google is appealing against the charges against Fabio Jose Silva Coelho, who was released after he agreed to co-operate with the case, according to a police statement.

"Google is providing clarification to legal authorities," a company spokesman in São Paulo said on Wednesday.

The questioning came a day after a state court in São Paulo banned an online video that sparked violent protests across the Muslim world, giving Google 10 days to pull the video from its YouTube unit. Google has not been formally notified about that case, according to a company spokesman.

Taken together, the legal scrutiny represents the strongest pressure Google has yet faced in Brazil to control third-party content uploaded to its websites and the first time its senior executives have come under such intense fire.

But rather than reflecting a coherent national policy, the cases illustrate how aggrieved citizens can get a sympathetic hearing from local judges with extensive procedural powers.

In Google's case, judges have held executives responsible for resisting the removal of online videos in violation of a stringent 1965 electoral code. The law bans campaign ads that "offend the dignity or decorum" of a candidate.

Earlier this month an electoral court in the state of Paraíba ordered the arrest of another senior Google executive, Edmundo Luiz Pinto Balthazar, after the company refused to take down a YouTube video mocking a mayoral candidate there.

The video clip loaded by the user Paraíba Humor seized on a verbal slip by a candidate in a montage remarking, "What an idiot - give him an F!"

Within days another judge overturned the order to arrest Balthazar, writing that "Google is not the intellectual author of the video, it did not post the file, and for that reason it cannot be punished for its propagation."

The company also defended users' political rights in a statement at the time.

"Google believes that voters have a right to use the internet to freely express their opinions about candidates for political office, as a form of full exercise of democracy, especially during electoral campaigns," the company wrote.

Google faces frequent legal scrutiny over the limits of users' expression in Brazil, where it opened an office in 2005.

Over the years, the company has received repeated requests from Brazilian authorities to reveal the identity of bloggers and users of its social networking site Orkut, whose posts violated local libel and anti-racism laws.

In the second half of last year, Google removed four Orkut profiles after an electoral court order, the company said on a portion of its website called the Transparency Report.