Hello readers,
Natalia Viana, who helped lead the Invisible Hand project, says there are important takeaways for Americans in the investigation, starting with the fact that the fight to regulate Big Tech is, in her view, today’s most important issue. Viana, who co-founded and is co-executive director of Brazil’s largest nonprofit newsroom, Agência Pública, recently sat down with me over Zoom to talk about what sheher and her collaborators have learned. You can find our conversation below, edited for brevity and clarity.
Ryan Tate: What sparked the Invisible Hand project?
Natalia Viana: In Brazil, since 2023, we journalists who cover tech have been seeing a huge spike in lobbying activities. In 2023, Google and Facebook
stopped a bill that was very important, that was the closest we got to actually regulating Big Tech.
So we from
Pública started looking at, is this happening in other countries? From early reports we found out that yes, it was happening, and from what we learned from the Brazilian lobby, we understood that, because it's a very hierarchical structure within Big Tech, probably the same types of lobby tactics were being used elsewhere.
That's when we went to the Center for Latin American Investigative Journalism. And then we asked them, would you like to partner with us to manage this investigation? They have a lot of experience in doing transnational investigations and we didn't. So they got together all of these partners from Latin America. I was responsible for inviting media from other countries, specifically where we knew that there had been lots of (lobbying) activities, so the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Canada.
One of the things that was very interesting early on was that, in many countries, such as in Latin America, there was lobby activity, but investigative journalists had never looked at it.
Tate: When you went down that road and started asking those questions, what did you find?
Viana: First of all, they're using some of the same tactics that every other industry is using, such as big oil, big pharma, etc. They are hiring people from these other industries. But these are companies that vowed from early on to do no evil.
Number two is that these are the most profitable companies in the world. They have more power than everybody else. One of our partners, Núcleo Jornalismo, did a very interesting thing in which they tracked down on LinkedIn official hires within the government or global policy teams of Big Tech in Brazil.
And their reporter managed to to track down 75 people for 15 Big Tech companies. This is much bigger than for any other foreign industries in Brazil.
The third one is that Big Tech is different than every other industry because it doesn't touch just one aspect of the economy. They literally influence every aspect, not only banking, working, transportation but they also affect the lives of everybody — they are so infiltrated in everyone's lives. Everybody has a personal relationship with Big Tech — you Google, you WhatsApp your friends, you Skype with your friends. Each brand has a lot of emotional power within their relationship to people. So if they want to go, for instance, on a public opinion manipulation campaign, they can do it like this, which is what we saw in Brazil.
And then the final aspect is how within politics in Brazil, but I think in the U.S. as well and in other countries, social media, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube — they are crucial. They're essential for politicians to get elected. Essential. So if a politician, say, is booted out of one of these platforms, they will not get the votes. And so there is a power relation there that is established, and sometimes it's used and sometimes it's not used.
What we heard on the record is that politicians are scared of this relationship. It can literally kill the career of a politician. So they are in an imbalanced relationship with them.
And the other thing that we know, and this was lobbyists themselves that that told us, is that they can forge alliances by basically just offering training for and offering VIP treatment on their platforms. People told me, and I quoted this, “If there is a politician that calls me at 3 a. m. because they had a problem with their account, I will immediately get somebody to fix that.”
Tate: You talk about, in the “Invisible Hand” articles,
many forms of contact between Big Tech and politicians. It could be a meeting, or VIP tech support, or a trip, or a private meeting. Big Tech frames it like education: “We are educating the lawmakers.” What do the politicians get out of this and what and what do you think Big Tech is really trying to achieve?
Viana: What Big Tech is trying to achieve is political influence. One of the things that we found out is there's a lot of gatherings and not only trainings, there's happy hours, there's parties, there's lunches, etc. I learned, for instance, that Meta has a compliance thing that you can only spend $150 on each politician in each meeting. One hundred fifty dollars for a dinner in Brazil is huge. You can take anybody to the best restaurant in Brazil, to a Michelin restaurant. So that's the kind of hospitality kind of thing that they can offer that is necessarily above what any Brazilian company can do. So when there are issues of interest there are people they can talk to and they can exert pressure.
In the end, they managed to get their own caucus. There is a group in the (Brazilian National) Congress which is called the digital caucus, and they basically absolutely just defend the line of Big Tech. These are people who do not have a social base, they have a digital base, so they don't really know their supporters — they are influencers. They're influencer politicians. They live off creating scandals. They live off building polemic online.
Then, and this happens everywhere, Big Tech insidiously inserted in any debate of regulation, it doesn't matter what issue is being discussed, they say the law is about censoring freedom of expression. It doesn't matter if it's a law that tries to regulate competition or if it's a law that tries to
secure children's rights or if it's a law that tries to
fight fake news or allow for
payment for journalism. All of this is just put as a blanket statement, this is censoring freedom of expression.
Tate: One of the interesting things you write about is, there is a regulatory fight where the news media are trying to get Google to pay for news that it leverages, and at the same time there is also a financial relationship between Google and the news media. I was very interested to
read your reporting on payments or other benefits Google provides to news publishers. How has Google's relationship with the news media evolved? Does there continue to be a tension in that relationship between, “we're gonna give you something but we can take it away?”
Viana: I'm gonna be absolutely blunt and honest. When we were investigating, we told the 17 media organizations that were part of this investigation, we think we should do a full disclosure, anybody who has received grants from Google should disclose it. When we at Agencia Pública looked back, we had received a crazy amount, 1.3 million reals, which is two or three hundred thousand dollars, and I was shocked. I was like, “whoa, actually it has been a big part of our budget.”
Of course, it was for a specific project, we applied for it. But that's how I realized how insidious this partnership is. Then we sent this question to Google: How does it make sense that a multi-billion dollar company is giving out money to an industry that is literally in a regulatory fight against it everywhere in the world. How does that make sense?
Then when I started talking to former Google employees, one of them coined a phrase that I thought was amazing for one particular program, he called it “
renting your enemy.” I thought this was beautifully framed because it basically shows that not all Google news initiatives, but some of those programs were literally made to satisfy or placate the media that was really putting pressure on Congresses to rearrange or rebalance the relationship. The media is deeply dependent on Google for search, for traffic, for etc. We need Google, we need Facebook to reach our own audience who are Brazilians who live, you know, two blocks away from us. But this is an international organization that can literally change the rules or change the algorithms anytime, as they do, and suddenly it means that you lose 20%, 30% of your Brazilian readers. So this is a relationship in which we have zero control and a foreign company has complete control. That's why we're asking for it to be regulated, at least for the rules to be clear.
Tate: If there is one thing you’d like people in the United States to learn from your work, what would it be?
Natalia: Look, it's the following.
I don't like traditional media in my country. It is run by men, traditional families, they've been the same forever, they're very resistant to change. A woman like me hardly gets to the top. However, it's Brazilian companies. They're Brazilians like me. They speak the same language as I do. They have the same values. We've seen the same things when we were children. We sing the same anthem.
What we are seeing here is a global phenomenon that is caused by a handful of American companies that are literally getting all the money from everywhere in the world and refusing to share with the people who are producing the knowledge and the money. So it is a very simple issue. All we're saying is, you have to share the profit with the local communities.
The lobby of Big Tech and the fight and the struggle for regulation is the most important issue of today.
Tate: I wanted to ask about the European Union. Pretty much every country in the Western Hemisphere has less tech regulation than the EU. Do you think those countries will become more like the EU in this regard? Or do you think the EU will become more deregulated because they want some of this tech money and success the U.S. has disproportionately seen?
Natalia: I have zero doubt that technologies as powerful as the tools that Big Tech are rolling out will be regulated. It may take 10 years. It may take 20 years, but it's going to happen because they’re just too harmful and too dangerous to be left out there in the open. Many bad things may happen before that, genocides or mass shootings or mass suicides. But as one Brazilian politician said, I really hope that we don't need to wait for another huge disaster that is made possible by Big Tech platforms before we can actually regulate.
Right now the debate is a bit stalled because of Trump. Trump formed an alliance with Big Tech which is really scaring off a lot of other governments. And Trump is really sure that he doesn't want any regulation to happen anywhere, but of course there's movements happening everywhere. Just three months ago in Brazil we approved a law that establishes criteria for children to use social media. In Sao Paulo, the largest city in the global south, there is a ban on using mobile phones in school, and this was approved with like 90% approval from the citizens.
Because these tools are being used by so many people in so many countries, very likely the only real solution will be a multinational solution. I tend to look a lot at the transnational convention that was signed, I think, in the early 2000s to control tobacco. It's like a hundred countries sat together and said, no, we need to control tobacco. The industry is very strong, it has lobbies everywhere, but we really need to establish rules for everybody. I think that is a very good model for big tech. Of course, if you look at this convention, it took 20 years to be built. It's going to take a lot of time.
Thank you, as always, for reading. If there are international tech topics you’d like to read about on this site, or stories you know about and think we might be interested in, shoot me an email at
ryan.tate@themarkup.org.
Sincerely,
Ryan Tate
Deputy Editor
The Markup/CalMatters
