What is the digital ECA and what is it designed to protect us from? What does he have to protect, or at least avoid? What happens when some of what was on the deep web comes to the internet and children can access it? And what happens when these children are exposed to all kinds of violence regularly, without anyone seeing it? And regarding the consequences of this, because we are seeing violence among teenagers increasing and increasing significantly in elite schools, in upscale neighborhoods, among very wealthy families, which is a complex issue, full of nuances, with many very complicated ramifications here in Brazil, in the non- fiction segment, where we talk about everyday science, we will hear from Vanessa Cavalieri, who is a judge and head of the Children and Youth Court of Rio de Janeiro, and also a professor of children's and adolescents' rights at Infanã and Emerge. and she is the creator of the protocol. I see you. Let's have a crucial conversation with her. Oh, and a disclaimer for those who are going to watch this conversation: it's a conversation that contains triggers for violence, and it's a conversation that I'll have to rely on you sharing to send to other people, because this is probably the type of content that won't be promoted and printed on social media. Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you so much for the privilege. I've wanted to have this conversation with you here for a long time, and unfortunately, the reasons for having this conversation have only grown and taken shape through various developments. To address some topics I intend to discuss with you, which I think are all very relevant, it's all tied together. I want to untie them with you. We have cases of animal abuse. There was the case of the dog, the female dog with the big ear that was attacked and killed. And there's a statement of yours that's very striking to me, which is quite telling of the situation, which is that there are dozens of these cases happening every day. And we see this happening online. We have cases of violence against girls orchestrated by boys, organized by young people, organized by men, and violence against women orchestrated by men. And we see this in the discussion group of the elite high school in the west side of São Paulo, talking about girls who could be raped, and the policeman who apparently executed his wife or woman or partner, and in the conversation they are now revealing, they were calling her a submissive beta, while he is the alpha male. So, at the very least, some violence surrounding this is happening because of an ideology that, to me, is very much tied to everything else, and many other things are happening in Brazil right now, especially in relation to women, all of which is tied to the internet. I wanted to start by bringing up this topic and drawing on your experience. You took over the juvenile court in Rio de Janeiro in 2015, if I'm not mistaken, and I believe you witnessed this transformation of the internet post-Gamergate, after all that stuff abroad about attacks on women, with people discovering that misogyny was what catalyzed the internet against specific individuals, so it was a good tool. What have you seen change in these 10 years that leads us to see this type of problem happening now? Well, I also wanted to say thank you, you know? It's an invitation to be here, and it's great that we were able to coordinate our schedules. I think things happen at the right time, so maybe more things need to happen for us to be able to enrich our conversation here. Well, I actually work in the juvenile court in Rio de Janeiro since 2015. It's the only court in the capital responsible for judging offenses committed by adolescents. What this means is that all the crimes, you know, in quotes, because the name of the crime is technically a juvenile offense, but the only difference is the age of the perpetrator, that happen in the city of Rio de Janeiro, they are concentrated in a single court, which is the court where I am the presiding judge. So I end up having a very peculiar and privileged point of observation regarding this phenomenon, this phenomenon of adolescent involvement in acts of violence, the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency, because I have a database that isn't a sample; it's a database that tells me: "Is this what happens in Rio de Janeiro ?" Or at least that's what reaches the courts; all of this will go through you, all of this will go through me. So I have this database, and since 2016 I 've been collecting this data and compiling it into an Excel spreadsheet, right? So, we don't have a program that runs this and allows me to pull reports, but I do have this, the raw data concentrated somewhere, and it's not a sample, it's the totality of the data that has arrived since 2016. We're in 2026, so I have a decade of data, including biopsychosocial data of these young people that are collected daily when a boy is apprehended in the act or when he is facing justice. So, I know their age, I know the neighborhood where they live, I know their family structure, their level of education, how many siblings they have, whether they use drugs or not, what type of crime they committed, whether they have a criminal record or if it's their first offense. So, there is important data there that allows us to draw a certain profile and even point out vulnerabilities and propose articulation with public policies that can be developed to change this scenario. Historically, those who ended up in juvenile court were often defendants who, later in life, would end up in the prison system, that is, in the criminal justice system. This would typically mean the poorest, most vulnerable children, born into very disadvantaged and disorganized families, lacking physical, material, and emotional resources to cope with the situation. They didn't have access to quality education, their fathers weren't present, and they ended up involved in crimes closely linked to the rapid acquisition of wealth, especially robbery, theft, and drug trafficking, right? Symptom of inequality. So, I think it's a symptom of inequality with a few other things added to it, right? In a very, very consumerist society. I don't think the problem is capitalism, I think the problem is consumerism, right? We have capitalist societies where there is less consumerism and things don't work the same way, but today in Brazil we live in a society where to be is to have, right? And to have is to be, and your success and your power are defined by the things you can buy. And this boy, he wants the same thing as any boy his age who was born into a rich family; he wants to have brand-name sneakers, like me, being from Rio, he wants to have the official Flamengo jersey, and so on, right? And he wants money to spend at the party and to have an energy drink with vodka, with isc. And that's how he gets that money, because he doesn't get an allowance, unlike the rich kid who doesn't need to steal, because he has his allowance guaranteed to buy those things. And then, in recent years, we started to notice a change in this profile, or rather, the addition of another profile that didn't reach the justice system and didn't appear in the police reports. So, besides that poorer kid, a resident of a community, in the context I mentioned, who obviously continues to arrive and will probably continue to do so for a long time until Brazil adopts public policies capable of changing this scenario, but we've also started seeing young people, teenagers from middle and upper classes, students from the best private schools in Rio de Janeiro, residents of upscale neighborhoods, born into families not only with a more stable economic situation, but also with the minimum resources that we understand are necessary for a teenager, a child, to develop safely and healthily. And they started arriving there in 2018, 2019, in a very timid way still. After 2020, 2021, we had an atypical scenario because it was a pandemic, so everything was kind of in airplane mode, everything was kind of hibernating. But when the pandemic ended there, starting in 2022, things began to arrive with much greater intensity. And in 2023 we had a really catastrophic scenario, which was that wave of attacks in schools all over Brazil, which I imagine you must remember. And there were many attacks in various cities in Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro, including here in São Paulo, some truly tragic cases with the deaths of teenagers, students, and teachers. And I started receiving these cases, and there were many, dozens of cases of teenagers involved in school attacks that came to me. And I, in addition to having this database, you know, of the complete picture of Rio de Janeiro, have another point of observation. I have this zoom lens, a wide- angle lens, but I also have that zoom lens that goes right into the eye, because I look into the boy's eyes , he sits in front of me, I talk to him, I listen to his stories, you know? So, I have a plan to talk to him. So, talking to these boys, questioning them and listening to their stories, day after day, seeing the stories repeat themselves, I realized that, in fact, the story was always the same and that they were telling a story in which they had followed a path that had led them to commit that act of extreme violence or to plan the act without carrying it out because the police arrived first. And these were stories in which they had been victims of much suffering, much exclusion, much humiliation, much violence. And nobody saw anything happening. They were only noticed when they stopped being victims and assumed the position of aggressors. But they were targeted with a purpose, a purpose so that they would be punished, imprisoned, and placed in a location where they no longer needed to be seen, where they could remain invisible. When I realized that this was a recurring story and that I was part of this cycle of invisibility, since I was the one wielding the pen that put this teenager back in prison to become invisible again, I decided that I was going to break the cycle, that when I got there I was going to see him and I was going to force everyone to see what I was seeing. So, I started developing a socio-educational care methodology for this young person, which began to be worked on with the network and to bring together a multidisciplinary team, including mental health, education, family, restorative justice, and eventually other actors who, in a particular situation of a certain adolescent, became necessary, and together with these people, along with the Public Prosecutor's Office, the Public Defender's Office or defense attorney, draw up a plan of action in the life of this adolescent that could remove him from these risk factors and add protective factors so that he could then follow a different path. But that still wasn't enough, right? Because the stories kept repeating themselves, and so I became perplexed to see how nobody was noticing the problem, the magnitude of the problem, how parents weren't understanding what was happening on the internet, how parents had no idea what was going on , how schools didn't know how to address coexistence and violence in schools, how there were gaps in regulation, how important it was for the public authorities to also build regulatory policies. And that's when I decided to leave the four walls of the courtroom and start talking, mainly with schools and families, about what I was seeing, so that everyone could see the magnitude of what I was seeing, because it had truly become such an anguish that it felt immoral and unethical for me to remain silent. I needed to get out, you know? I needed to share this with everyone I saw so that everyone understood their responsibility in the problem and also how they could be a solution. And that's how the protocol began, I see you, I started giving these talks and that's probably how, at some point, you heard one of my videos and got to know me. Instagram ended up going viral and becoming well-known, you know. And so , we realized what kind of trajectory this boy was following, you know, as he arrived there. They started this exclusion, these humiliations, and this loneliness in childhood, around 6 or 7 years old, boys who don't have friends, who don't make friends, who are alone at school, sitting on the playground bench, without playing with anyone at recess, who, when the physical education teacher puts together the team, are never chosen for the team, who, when families have a party, a get-together, a playdate, are not invited. Often, because it's a neurodivergent child, sometimes even without a diagnosis yet, but who has a condition where one of the signs is greater difficulty socializing, the school doesn't acknowledge it, nobody sees it, right? But it grows. And then when he grows up, he'll reach a point in adolescence that will coincide with the beginning of the second phase, right, of the fundamental cycle. So, middle school (grades 6-9), which would start around the sixth grade, also historically coincides with the most critical age range for bullying, which is from 11 to 14 years old, okay ? That's when he starts to suffer bullying, and the bullying will put him in this very severe psychological distress. Bullying is torture, isn't it? Equating it to something else, it's torture. And again, nobody sees it. While he's being victimized, nobody sees it. The school is unaware of the situation, and the parents know nothing about it either. The audience, which consists of the students watching, does n't take a stand; he doesn't have a support group. And why does he become the victim or target of bullying? Because he's very weakened by the lack of what strengthens human beings the most , which are good relationships, and he doesn't have them, right? And then, uh, he submits, he subjects himself to the bullying. That's an interesting question, since we're on a science podcast, right? Well, here's the thing: the worst thing you can say to a child or teenager who is being bullied is to tell them to defend themselves, to fight back, or to not let them do that to them. Because you know, all animals have a survival mechanism, which is the fight-or-flight response. Faced with danger, we either run away, which is the best thing to do and gives us a better chance of survival, or we fight against that danger. But there is a third possibility, which is paralysis. But paralysis is dysfunctional, yes, because it doesn't lead to survival, it leads to death, right? If you approach the lion, and you neither run nor fight, he will eat you and you will die. Yeah, the victim of bullying, she's in paralysis mode. His survival instincts are so dysfunctional, he's so weakened that he's not fighting for his own survival. Then, he freezes. It's the way you've lost control over whatever's happening and you simply accept whatever comes and surrender to what happens to the animal, and when it happens to the animal it's because it's going to die, because it's over, it's finished fighting, it has no more energy, it's exhausted its cortisol, it's all gone, it simply gives up on everything like that. And that's why we sometimes see in bullying videos like this, the victim of bullying is sometimes a boy who is much bigger physically, stronger than the aggressor, and he doesn't react. If he punched the attacker, he would fall backward. But he doesn't react. He doesn't react because, although he's physically stronger, emotionally he's much more fragile, right? And then we catch this animal, right? This human being, who is in no condition to react, who has already surrendered to be slaughtered, says: "You have to fight back, don't let them do this to you." If he could react, if he couldn't let them do that to him, he wouldn't even be a victim of bullying; he's only a victim of bullying because he can't react, right? And that's why it's so important for adults to do their part, right? The responsibility for confronting and interrupting bullying lies with adults, the school, adults at the school, and parents as well. From the parents of everyone involved. And the audience is engaged. An essential audience for bullying to occur. Well, but then he's not being defended by anyone and he's suffering. He shows signs of this suffering, but again, no one sees it. He's not seen at school and he's not seen at home either, which is a time we're living through – we can talk about this in a moment – ​​when families are very dysfunctional, parents are very busy, very distracted, and they don't notice the signals their children are giving. And here's the cherry on top, right? So, what changed? So, the other day a friend of mine who's a psychologist, with whom I was talking about this subject, asked me: "Vanessa, okay, but this has always happened, there's always been a boy who sat alone on a bench, there's always been bullying, and there weren't attacks at school?" That's the question I was going to ask , because I don't want to validate or accept it just because it's common, but when I was in school there was always someone who lacked social skills, did n't have friends, or was excluded, and then there was bullying. I don't recall witnessing firsthand the type of bullying we see in famous cases now, but it's always existed to some degree, right? What changes now? Exist. So, what changes? I think two things change, okay? The first thing that changes, and I think this is the icing on the cake, is that before, a boy who suffered bullying and who was there with all that pent-up suffering, suffering, angry, hateful, wanting revenge, he had nowhere to run. He didn't have much of an outlet for this desire for revenge and this pent-up anger. Now, what happens to this boy? He's going like this , I think that's the icing on the cake, what a big change. He then goes to a place where I always say this phrase, and I'll repeat it forever until it's no longer necessary, right? This is the most dangerous place a child or teenager can be alone these days. He goes to a digital environment and there he is alone, without adult supervision. And that's where the big difference lies, because there he will find what he has been looking for since he was little, when he sat alone on the playground bench. He finds friends, he finds his peers, who are who? who are other boys with the same stories of suffering, exclusion, isolation, bullying, and invisibility. But these boys are seeing him there for the first time. He is seen. He is seen. Others say he matters, they name the violence he suffered, and they have a revenge plan against those who caused so much pain—it's in their words that I read weekly on the computers I 've learned, on cell phones; it's all there in the chat. Kill those who deserve to die. This is the revenge plan. I will kill whoever deserves to die. He entered fight mode. And so, many times, they end up putting this revenge plan into practice, whether by killing, entering a school, carrying out an attack, or punishing those responsible elsewhere. So, I think we 'll get into the issue of misogyny first, but I'm telling you the story of how they're recruited, right? So, how does the online radicalization of 12, 13, and 14-year-old boys happen? They all went through that scenario. This is something I observed in dozens of cases of extreme violence in schools that I was asked to judge. Later, I came into contact with Professor Telma Vinha from Unicamp's GEPEN in 2000, and around mid-2023 I met her. She is the leading researcher on school violence in Brazil, right? And this JEPEN group, their work is incredible. It's a group we'll definitely have conversations with later, for sure. Yes, she has a 2024 report on the 2023 attacks that was revised in 2025. And she concluded exactly the same thing, right? But she conducted a nationwide survey that focused more on cases involving death, right? in cases of violent attacks resulting in death. For me, whether there was an attack, whether there was a death or not, is irrelevant when we're talking about prevention, because if by chance the family and the police managed to investigate quickly and catch them, that doesn't change everything that happened before. The avoidance of violence was circumstantial. Of course, saving lives is important, but it's not the only end in itself when we think about the strategy for dealing with the situation. And she concludes the same thing, that there's a very long way to go before reaching that point of being ready to radicalize, ready to swallow a discourse by whatever name we want to give it, red pill, misogynist, incel, uh, far-right. I personally hate when people use "far-right" because I think it politicizes things where it's not political, okay? Thus, in the sense of a partisan politician. Well, many people don't even know what right and left are. And, and it 's not because of that, you know, I think that, for example, the anger, the hatred of women is much more in the sense of understanding that these girls exclude him and he will never have a chance to date the popular and pretty girl at school because he's the weird one and she won't date him, rather than because he identifies with that far-right party, you know? And so I think that's the big change, right? It's the echo and the megaphone that social media and the digital environment bring to these teenagers. There used to be a boy who would say things like, "Oh my god, I really want to grab a knife, go into the school, and stab that girl who humiliated me in front of everyone all over." It all stayed in his head. There was no echo. He had no idea that this could actually be done most of the time. a country that had weapons in abundance. He's been doing this, just like they've been doing in the United States for decades, right? Exactly. That's what he's thinking now. When he arrives at a forum on Discord, he sees 300 other people saying the same thing with the same story. 300 they want to kill, 300 girls they humiliated, 300 teachers they think were unfair, and 300 classmates they bullied. Then he realizes, "Wait, but then what I'm thinking isn't so absurd after all." In truth no. Of course it 's not absurd, it's deserved. We have the right to do this because you went through it, and so I went through it too. So that starts to take shape, to become viable, you know? It's not so absurd anymore, because everyone agrees that that's what it is, that it's an honorable and viable way out. I think it 's largely due to the herd mentality of social media, right? In the sense that you repeat that truth so many times and become focused on that single thought bubble, which I think is the biggest trap on social media. This single thought bubble that the algorithm puts us in is what used to seem like a crazy, absurd idea to a kid back in the 80s, and it stayed just in their thoughts. Now it's not something perfectly reasonable to do. Can I bring up a few more factors that you can tell me if they also come into play? Well, I think I have the impression, I'm the father of a boy who's almost 5 years old , but I already have to worry now because I don't want to see him going through that or any other kind of mistreatment, for some reason close to that, or treating girls or women that way for some reason in this life. But I'm also someone who creates content online and has been on YouTube since at least 2013. So, I've experienced a bit of what that digital transformation has been like. I have the impression that a few other things have changed as well. One is the record of it happening, because if there were bullies, it was restricted to the school, restricted to the classroom, restricted to that circle, or it happened on the street after class or something like that. There wasn't someone with a cell phone to pull it out, film that humiliation, record it, and post it on a social network, post it in a school group, or post it somewhere later and organize that bullying as something institutional. Moving away from the victim a little , right? But the group, the group, right? And all this footage will stay with you for the rest of your life, showing that in that situation, on that trip, at that time, they filmed you being humiliated and they can use it against you at any moment. So, the thing takes on this scale where it will mark you, it will follow you for the rest of your life, just like any record on the internet does today, right? Well, the internet never forgets, does it? And that's just talking about the boys, not to mention the girls who also have 500 other problems piled on top of that. Well, there's also the fact that it pays well to do this, it pays well to organize these things, it pays well to do a Pill podcast, it pays well to create a channel to get men involved in organizing themselves to do this. It makes money to set up a group on Discord that will create a pool and put money in every weekend to post or do something else, and someone will do that. Well, and particularly regarding misogyny, there's a lot of money involved, right? Without even mentioning political capital, votes, or other things, it 's also a good tool for raising awareness of causes that we're having a conversation about here— I don't know if it will be on air while we're talking here, I believe not yet—with Yuri, who is a researcher at Unicamp, ah, misinformation about science accompanies content of male supremacy, or masculinist or sexist or misogynistic, however we want to call it, and the boys who most often respond that global warming doesn't exist are boys. And they are, for example, more likely to respond that women shouldn't be in leadership positions, or other things. So, their evidence is indirect, but it points to this common thread, which is finding this cause of oppression and hatred towards women to tie other things together, in this case, climate change denial, right? Well, and to get something, whether it's a case or something like that, you can see that there are a lot of people involved there with a lot of power and a lot of money who are interested in subjugating women and doing whatever they want with them, right? So, it seems to me that there are also other new factors that come into play to amplify this victimization that was happening before. Yes, I agree when you talk about the issue of cyberbullying, right, this online bullying. I see it this way , I mentioned a factor that, for me, is paramount: the stage and setting that the digital environment provides for this to happen. Yes, there's another change that I think has been very important since then, which is the style of educating. So, families have changed, right? And today we have a parenting style, a very permissive way of raising children, in many families. So , back in the '80s and '90s, I always talk about this and I'm always heavily criticized when this comes up in the digital world, because there was a parental model of raising children that was mostly authoritarian and violent, and it didn't work, right? It didn't work. Spanking, swallowing your tears, if I'm not going to give you a real reason to cry , don't argue with me, children don't get to decide. This model didn't work. He created a society that we have today, we adults who were raised in this model, and I was, probably you too, uh, violent, a society that kills four women a day, and they are killed not in a robbery or by a psychopathic serial killer, they are killed by a man who swore to evil and protected them. A man who probably heard when he was a child : "I'm hitting you because I love you." Okay ? So, trying to connect those dots didn't work. Well , it didn't work out. And so, in this search, in this attempt to distance ourselves from this model that we know didn't work because it hurt the soul, because it disconnected parents and children, because there came a point when all we wanted was distance from our parents, right? Because we didn't trust them when we had a problem. Well, there was a search to move away from that model and to find a way of educating that was more respectful, that was non-violent. So what happened? Many people have confused a more constructive, even restorative, parenting model with permissiveness, which is the worst of all, the one that causes the most harm, in my opinion and in the opinion of many early childhood education scholars. Why? Because when the parenting model is permissive, there is no adult acting as an adult in that family's life. And when children are left alone to do what adults should be doing, they are abandoned. So, what is this role of the adult that adults aren't fulfilling? It's a leadership role. The role of adults in the family—the father, the mother, children, and adolescents—is to guide, to lead, to say: "This is the way, this is the way we're going." And it's a role that involves making the difficult and irreversible decisions in the child's life. The important decisions, those that once made will have irreversible consequences, are the ones that parents have to make. And they are relinquishing that power, that hierarchy, that authority, and delegating it to children and teenagers. When a child is left to bear the burden of decision-making that should be the responsibility of adults, without being able to do so because they are just a child or a teenager, a psychological phenomenon called the parentification of the child often occurs. Hmm. What is the parentification of the child? The child internalizes the adult, becomes the adult version of themselves, and then, obviously, loses their childhood. This often happens. Those are the kids over there who, at 13 or 14 years old, are already taking care of themselves, and if you're not careful, their parents and siblings too. And this has a huge impact on a person's life. And many even commit suicide and never reach adulthood. We have suicide rates among teenagers today that we've never had before. Depending on the specific segment we focus on, if we look at girls aged 10 to 14, suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers today. That's very scary too. Yes, in Brazil and around the world, it's very frightening. So this is a problem that I think is when you mix permissiveness with this lack of supervision on the internet, it's an explosive mix. And then I think there are two more factors. Well, one of them is cyberbullying, which is happening differently from the bullying that only occurred in the analog environment when the digital environment didn't exist. So the boy would go to school and he would be insulted, or he would get tripped, or have his lunch taken away, or he would get a slap on the neck. And then, everyone around would laugh, four, five, six would laugh, the others would just watch, and then he would attend class, and maybe at the end of class, on his way out, he would suffer yet another humiliation. And then he would go home and suddenly at home he had a neighbor in the building who was super nice, who liked the same things as him, and he would stay at the neighbor's house listening to LPs and whatever, and chatting, playing video games, or talking about the planets and about dinosaurs. And he was getting out of that toxic stress, that chronic stress, right? That stress that keeps repeating itself, that keeps accumulating. He needed a break during this stressful time. He would only deal with that situation again when he returned to school the next day, or if it was a weekend, he would spend the entire weekend there without experiencing that stressful situation. Then I would return on Monday. Yes, bullying was a condition of one person, excuse me, it was an event of the day and not that person's life condition. Exactly. It was a specific moment, it was violence, it generated stress, it was terrible, atrocious, cruel, but it was a specific event. Not now, cyberbullying, it's going to happen if we're going to stay like this. The boy arrived at school, got a slap on the back of the neck, the others laughed, but someone filmed it and that ended the situation in person, but the video didn't end there because it went to a WhatsApp group, it went to Esplana's stories and it was shared exhaustively and when he got home and picked up his phone and looked at WhatsApp, he saw that he was in all the groups being ridiculed and that nobody invited him to the party over the weekend because he was excluded and that everyone else was having fun. He wasn't called. So this state of stress, resulting from bullying and exclusion, will last 24 hours. That's why, for example, the law against bullying punishes cyberbullying much more harshly than bullying itself. These are two crimes, but cyberbullying is punished much more severely. And I think the third, or rather , the fourth very important change, which is something I observed happening, for example, from 2019, is, you're describing before and after the pandemic, right? From 2019 to 2023 or 2024, what has changed? Well, 2019 was a very difficult year in terms of school attacks, because it was the year of the Columbine shooting, the first one, which became very famous. It was 20 years ago, it turned 20 on April 20, 2019. So, at that moment there was a worldwide movement combining several mass shootings in April 2019 as a tribute to Columbine. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, we had more planned attacks in 2019 than in 2023. But what was the big difference between 2019 and 2023? Here in 2019, this was happening on the Deep Web, the dark web. This did not happen on the surface. In 2023, already in 2023, and even more so in 2024, this started happening on the surface web. So this violence came out of the dark web, the deep web, and migrated to the surface. I'll explain where, but just for those listening, in case someone doesn't quite understand what the deep web or dark web is, or its practical importance? It 's much more difficult for a teenager or child to access the dark web, and on the dark web or deep web, to find a group that's planning attacks on schools. It's a site without an obvious address; you have to know that the group exists, you have to know about it, you have to have an invitation, you have to find it. It's much more difficult; you need more advanced technological knowledge to get there. Now it's on the surface, in other words, it's on social media. What does a teenager need to find a forum for extreme violence? A cell phone in hand. That's all that's needed . And practically everyone has a cell phone in their hand. We have research that suggests I think 96% of teenagers use cell phones. So, where is this happening? Especially on Discord, right? Discord is currently the most used app and platform for committing online crimes among teenagers. So, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, the old Twitter, X, Telegram groups, so on, all of that is used. These are all apps that are one click away from being used; no searching required. And we already have nuances like that in cases that I've been following that come to my court, for example, we know that several teenage TikTok users have had links suggested to them in their forums, right, by the algorithm, to communities of extreme violence on Discord, so there's no need to even search for them, right? He's there watching TikTok and suddenly a link pops up, and then you take a 12- year-old boy who clicks on the link, enters a private server, and suddenly it's a self-harm community, and he's seeing a lot of people cutting their arms and bleeding. That's very seductive for a teenager. It's kind of like the logic of a horror movie, right? It's scary, it generates a bit of fear and aversion, but nobody can stop watching, right? I mean, I personally hate it, but teenagers come and like to watch it. Why do people like to see things that shock, that scare, that have all that blood, right? So, many people start to become fascinated by it, half seduced, half perplexed, and they ca n't let go. And not every teenager is recruited, nor is every teenager radicalized. What makes some people stay, while others, God forbid, think, "I'm not going to stay and see this awful place and just leave, right?" So this is something we can think about regarding what's happening, why some people stay and get so involved. Several points there for me. One of them is me. I lived through the chaos that TikTok caused in social media, because correct me if I'm wrong, but as a content creator or user, I saw what it was like when YouTube started allowing music piracy and other things, and as it grew, in part, it had to take on contracts with record labels, with a lot of things, and prohibit piracy and no longer allow uploading illegal movies or music videos. There's a huge amount of censorship these days, you don't even need to call it censorship, okay folks? There's enormous scrutiny, a huge filter that prevents you from uploading any moment from a film, clip, or video; they err on the side of excess, not lack. Wonder. Instagram, too, for me, was at that point until a little before TikTok, but then TikTok came along to a certain extent, and Kawaii, much more so, which, in order to gain users, are allowing that borderline pornography, borderline violence content, half forbidden, half allowed, it's okay. Kawai was caught hiring fake news content to generate clicks. And the others are starting to see, well, if I don't adopt this measure, I'll be left behind. I'll be left behind . So, Instagram in particular, for me, I have this experience, I don't know if it's a fact or what happened, but it seems to me that it has passed, it has gone back to allowing much more content of nudity, violence and other things to compete with TikTok than it did a little before. And I think a little bit of this competition from these people, not to mention the Telegram groups, Discord, and other things, kind of allows for a little more of that, because you 're dealing with networks that, at least until today, due to misinformation, at least due to Drausio's complaint about those who advertise with false publicity, using his name, Draus Varela, with health advertisements, are the networks that don't respond to that. YouTube gives me a tool that allows me to say, "If someone is using your video, it shows me everywhere my face is appearing." If they took a clip of my video, if they took something, a quote, then I have a certain amount of control over my image. Instagram, good luck. So it's not a technical difficulty, it's a platform strategy issue, right? That's part of their recipe. Well, I don't find it strange to hear those names, because at least in terms of health misinformation, these are networks that traditionally allow a bit more of that. TikTok has its own policy on what can and cannot be posted, which I can't even explain because it's super opaque, but Instagram seems much more flexible about this in recent years with the rise of TikTok than it was before. I don't know if that's how you feel about them. Look, Atila, I can't really tell you because, from the point of view of what I observe—not as a judge in the children's court, but as a mother and as a user of social media—because as a judge I can tell you that I only know what happened when it started happening, it didn't happen before. So I don't know if it didn't happen because it was n't happening or because the social media platforms were more careful, right? They were better protected, but it wasn't enough, was it? And then I'll put the pandemic in that month. So, the pandemic, the pandemic has a role, it has a role in perhaps accelerating or bringing to an earlier point in life the access to so many virtual spaces, right? So, I'm going to speak as a mother. I observed this during the pandemic. When I had two daughters, when the pandemic started, one was 11 years old and the other was about to turn 12. No, I was about to turn 13, I was 12 and 11. So this one here was about to turn 13, she ended up getting a cell phone and gaining a little more freedom to use social media, WhatsApp groups and stuff, because it was the only way she had to interact with her classmates, you know, and to have classes, right? Yes, but for class she even had a small computer, a Chromebook; she didn't need her cell phone for class, but she did need her cell phone to have some kind of social life. Uh-huh . And the youngest one, our idea was not to give her a cell phone so early, to wait until she was about 13, but again, all her friends had them, and if I didn't give her one , she wouldn't even have a way to talk to anyone, right? So I ended up releasing it, and this happened with many families, and at a time when parents were much less digitally literate than they are today , people, even I, who already worked with children, who, you know, I consider myself a studious, enlightened person and all that, with a high level of education, I didn't know that parental control apps existed, for example. So, my control over usage time was pretty much manual, relying on the watch. I would look at her and say, " You've been on your phone for too long, give it back to me , let me take it back." And then my daughter would become a Dr. and Mr. Jack, Dr. Hyde, you know? It was like going from water to wine, she was a sweet, kind girl, and suddenly she turned into a beast because I took my cell phone away and then I said: "Wait a minute, is there something wrong with this?" I've seen this story before, but it was always about drug withdrawal in the news we read, right? That's when I started paying closer attention and said, "Let me study this, let me see what's going on." But like this, I remember that back in 2018, before the pandemic, 2018 or 2019, I started a movement at their school to try to convince the principal to ban the use of cell phones during recess in the sixth and seventh grades, no, in the sixth and seventh grades, right? Because it was prohibited until the fifth grade, it was allowed in the sixth grade . And then what I saw was that suddenly I went to school to do something and I looked at the playground, all the 12-year-old kids were on their cell phones and nobody was talking, nobody was playing, nobody was doing anything except being on their cell phones. And I started raising this debate in the mothers' WhatsApp group, talking to the principal. And I was a crazy, alien mother. I was an alien in a school with 1500 students. There was no one who agreed with me. People say, "But what's the problem? They're doing TikTok dances together." I said, "Guys, but there's a problem with this. There's a problem with not playing, not moving around, just dancing on TikTok. There's a problem with us walking through the hallways at recess, and everyone's playing Minecraft in the hallway instead of playing ball." And I was an alien, right? As you yourself said. So that's changed, right? right? So, at that moment, I think there was this need to free up equipment because of the pandemic, because both the need for studying, for classes, and also for entertainment and social life, meant that the need to look the person in the eye to understand the consequences of what you said and did to them was interrupted. All. And then, on top of that, these were families who weren't digitally literate, and who also had no idea that there was a danger. We were still living in the Dark Ages. I like to compare that first moment when we started giving smartphones to children, around 2000—maybe in Brazil a little later than in the United States, I think around 2015—with the smokers of the 1950s. Exactly. The mental model I have, even for AI today, seems to be: " Everyone shouldn't let their child smoke, they'll lose weight, it will help them concentrate, let them use AI, let them use their cell phone." I think that's it, people are starting to wake up, they're like, looking at the screen, I think we've already left, we're already in the 80s of cigarettes, everyone already knows that it's bad, that it causes cancer, right? So, in the beginning, that's how it was, we smoked, I mean, I wasn't born at that time, but people smoked to pass the time, because it was chic, why not? And so, I use, there's a presentation I give when I talk about change, and about the need for us to update ourselves, even a lecture I give to judges about the digital ECA (Statute of the Child and Adolescent), where I show some cigarette ads from the 50s and 60s. So, one ad is of a nurse dressed in a nurse's uniform smoking and recommending cigarettes. An advertisement featuring a doctor, and the slogan is: "Doctors prefer this brand." And one of them is a baby saying to his mother: "Mommy, you need to try this cigarette." And she says, "Wow, that's great. You can never smoke too much of that particular cigarette." So, that was it. We had babies and healthcare professionals advertising cigarettes in the 50s and 60s. To get to where we are today, where you have a picture of someone with lung cancer all over the place on a cigarette box for people to look at every time they reach for a cigarette, we've had a long road of cultural change and awareness. I think this is happening with screens. Back in 2018, we had this mentality that it was okay to have a cell phone, but he likes it so much, look how happy he is, they're already becoming familiar with technology, they're learning from an early age. Look, there's no point in banning this generation. It's a generation, they are the digital natives. Today we know that the expression "digital native" is misleading, because they are not digital natives, right? They find it easier to learn how to use technology, but that doesn't mean they know the risks, the dangers, and how to use it properly. And then I think one thing led to another and brought us to this point. But then I always remember this: the pandemic ended, we're all fine, we had a need, but it was a specific need, like we needed social distancing, like we needed to wear masks, like we needed to wash our hands in a way we don't anymore, right? We used to take precautions like that, but we don't do them anymore. These days, if you get a cold, you're sneezing, you're coughing, you go out on the street, you take a bus, the subway, and you don't wear a mask, right? Maybe one or two more careful people will do that, but the general population doesn't, right? So, it would be good if he did, but he doesn't . It's not a one-time thing, we didn't incorporate this practice today and it's here to stay. We understood that at that moment it was a matter of survival, we did it, but we left those exceptional measures that needed to be taken for that time. I think that this screen time for children and teenagers that was given during the pandemic with this justification, oh, but the pandemic was this exceptional measure that has already passed and there is nothing that justifies continuing with that situation, because today they can play ball, they can go to the beach, they can kiss, they can meet up, right? So I think that's a factor. So I think this also relates to that mentality you spoke about so well, a mentality that we need to change, a culture that believes danger is outside and that inside is safe, right? We still have that idea because that's how it was in the 80s and 90s; the danger was on the street, and inside the house it was safe. You locked the door, you're safe at home. What people need to understand is, I think , the day people understand this, 90% of the problems will be solved, which is understanding that the internet is the street. People need to understand that the internet is the street. If you ask me for advice for parents on how to protect their children in the digital environment, it's to remember that the internet is like the street, because we know how to protect ourselves on the street, we know what to do. We know at what age our child can't go out alone, at what age you still have to leave your 5-year-old child. I'm sure that when you cross a street with him, you end up holding his hand. You don't let go of their hand. But your son knows what red is, what green is, what yellow is, he doesn't. He knows what it is. You can explain it to him. You'll wait for the light to turn red here in São Paulo, for the traffic light to turn red. It's only when the light turns red that we'll watch the cars stop, and then we can cross the street. He understood the command, but you still don't let go of his hand because you know your child has an immature brain and that it's not the right time for him to be able to obey that command, even though he understood it. So, if you know that your child can't be left alone in a public place because they might not be able to wait and could get hit by a car, they also can't be alone on the internet, because the internet is the street. No, my son can already cross the street by himself. I can let go of his hand now because he knows how to obey commands. So maybe he can stay in front of the television while you go take a shower, because he understood the command. If someone approaches him, he will know how to respond. But does he leave the house alone? Is it leaving yet? Not yet. If he doesn't leave the house alone, he can't be alone on the internet, because the internet is the street and there will be strangers there. He already leaves the house alone. Does your child know which strangers are allowed into the house? Ah, we don't let strangers into the house. Yes, leave it. Yes, leave it. The guy who's going to fix the internet has arrived, can you let him in? Your neighbor has a leak, he said: "I'll send a worker to check the leak tomorrow at 8 am, can you let him in?" Then the pharmacy delivery guy arrived: "I didn't order from a pharmacy, you can't let them in." We adults know how to assess this risk. Your child already knows how to assess risk, which adults can enter and which cannot. My daughters, for example, already know. If I need to receive a service provider and I can't be there at the time, my daughter is able to receive them alone. So she can already be alone on the internet. If your child already knows how to do this refined level of analysis , to know which stranger they can talk to and which they can't, they can already be alone on the internet. Until then, they ca n't, they need supervision, they need more or less companionship, right? The company of adults . But we still have this idea that inside the house is safe. This mental model developed outside is applied inside. We need to change our mentality, our culture, we need to understand what the internet is. And so , I always say the following: if your child is in their room, this comfortable, safe room, with air conditioning, with a comfortable bed, but inside there's a cell phone, a laptop, a tablet with access to... The internet is like having a front door inside his room that you can't even see, because his bedroom door is closed off from the living room, you don't see it, but inside there's a door and that door allows any stranger to enter his room. And the strangers who enter, sit, talk, play, and eat at the table with him metaphorically are the worst possible. They are ill-intentioned people, not nice people who enter. So I think this is an issue that we need to emphasize and talk about until it seeps in, like osmosis. I've been talking, talking, talking, talking, and I've seen the change in mentality happen. The other aspect you bring up is this issue of the example that parents set in internet use, right? And I think there's also a very interesting piece of data, which is the following. They did a survey that shows the following: approximately 60-something, I don't know the exact percentage, of children say that they frequently talk to their parents and they don't answer because they are on their cell phones. Younger children, there. From 9 years old and under. And more than 60% of parents say that it 's frequent for their children to talk to them and they didn't hear because they were on their cell phones. Sorry. Uh, uh, this ties into something I was noticing as a biologist, as someone who's raising a child. If you ended up in an alien world, okay? An alien came, kidnapped you, dropped you in a new place, you don't know anything about that environment. How are you going to know how to interact or do anything? You're going to see what the aliens do. And where the aliens spend the most time and what they do with the most intensity is probably what's most important. If you have nothing, you don't know anything a priori about that place, I'll follow that, right? It's the children looking at us. And it's bizarre to see parents going to the square, going to the park or to do something. They let the child go, immediately pull out their cell phone, because all the child will see that's important in that environment, in that space, is looking at that screen. And if the child called, called, and You didn't look, it's not important to create that gaze, there's no need to develop it. She'll do something else and she'll never develop, or I don't know, she'll have less chance of developing the basic human interaction of how to talk and interact. So, I'm supposing here, I don't think it's even a topic for us to explain this or not, but I imagine that a lot of what we understand as increasing neurodivergence or undeveloped social skills, I don't know what, is dying at this stage where parents don't interact with their children because they are glued to the screen, not the child. The child will be later to free up more screen time for the parents, but we're in a much bigger problem. Yes, I'll even pick up on what you said, because the other day I was talking about this path of extreme violence that starts there at school, in this isolation. And then I had a pediatrician, right, a neuropediatrician, actually, in the audience, he came to talk to me at the end and he told me: "Vanessa, look, it's much earlier, it starts with newborn babies, because mothers are breastfeeding babies with the With the screen in hand, the baby ends up searching for the mother's eye contact, right? So, we know that in this construction of the psyche, up to 8 or 9 months of age, while the baby doesn't yet know that he is an autonomous being in relation to the mother, he seeks the mother's gaze, and through the mother's gaze that he sees while he nurses, whether at the breast or with a bottle, he first understands and enters into this somewhat symbiotic relationship, that he and the mother are one, until he begins to understand that he is not the mother and that he is another being. Finally, and all this theory, at least, about the construction of identity and personality. Uh, so what he said is that what's happening is , uh, they go a year without being able to make eye contact with their mother, and then uh, that generates consequences for the rest of their lives, including the loss of empathy. They're already studying a correlation this might have with subsequent conduct and personality disorders, because this empathy, this coexistence, this understanding of otherness with others isn't being built, okay? So this is very serious, very serious. I spoke with a researcher from a German university, and she said, "We're training pregnant women, you know , doing a kind of training course for pregnant women, teaching them that they can't use their cell phones while breastfeeding, they should n't smoke, they shouldn't drink alcohol, they should n't use their cell phones while breastfeeding, because the baby needs the mother's gaze, right? And so, I breastfed my daughters for a long time, and when the child starts to get a little older, they still breastfeed, it's very clear, around 8 or 9 months, if you start, for example, talking to someone while breastfeeding, the child either lets go of the breast and looks at you , or bites to get attention, because they want eye contact at that moment, it's theirs, right? And they need that interaction. Or if they see another interaction, they 're learning something about how people interact, right? Exactly. And then, uh, we get into this issue you mentioned about mealtimes, which is a point I emphasize a lot..." It's been a very, very, very long time since families stopped having meals together, right? They stopped sitting down at the table to eat. And that's not trivial; it's the backbone of human beings' communal living, right? I think we're the only animal— if you're a biologist, you can speak better than me— but we're the only animal that prepares meals to share and eat together, not just out of a need to feed ourselves and survive, but because it 's a moment of interaction and affection, of human connection. Even Michael Polon, in his book * Cooked*, says that when humans discovered fire and started cooking food, there was a change in how humans related to each other because they no longer needed to hunt and eat immediately; the animal could be brought home to the family to cook and for everyone to eat together. And from then on, we became less nomadic and stopped in places to share food, right? So, there 's a study that shows that having one meal a day as a family reduces by up to 60% of teenagers are at risk of becoming involved with alcohol, drugs, and unprotected sex. So, family meals are a protective factor in adolescence, and families are ceasing to do this. Everyone eats at the same time. Teenagers take their plates, heat them up, eat the food, and then go to their rooms, watching a series, each on their cell phone. We go to restaurants, and we clearly see four people from the same family— father, mother, two children—each on their cell phone, four cell phones at the table, nobody talks, nobody looks each other in the eye. And then the parents don't notice the signs I mentioned at the beginning that teenagers give, that children give, they show signs that something is wrong, but nobody notices because nobody is looking at each other. This thing about not being seen, right, about how much we need to reclaim togetherness, and how much the cell phone, as adults and as parents, removes us from this obligation to invest in togetherness, right? I don't need to look at my child. I don't need to see him suffering. I don't need to realize that he... It's quiet. I don't need to pay attention. I don't need to listen, and often I listen without knowing what to do or how to respond. I don't need to be emotionally available because the screen distracts me and distracts him, right? It distracts everyone and numbs us to all of that . But this lack of being seen will appear somewhere, it will appear like this: whoever isn't seen at the beginning will be seen at the end, when the boy is arrested, when he's admitted to a psychiatric clinic, when he attempts suicide, when she 's cutting herself, right, when she has a cardiac arrest because she stopped eating, nobody noticed she had anorexia. So, this care will have to appear at some point, whether it's at the beginning, in a preventive way, and it's much more pleasant and enjoyable if we can have this interaction with our children, right? Yes, there's something you just said, it occurred to me that first there's an agreement, if I'm not mistaken, one of the universal social agreements of all societies that you've seen is that you have a time of day when conversations... Things happen around mealtimes and bedtime, by the light of the campfire, that's kind of where the conversation happens. And I remember this at home, the moment I pick up my son from school, usually my wife takes him, I pick him up and you come, you know , starting the conversation. The trip home is short, but we start the conversation. "Oh, how was today? Who was there? Who wasn't? What did you eat, what didn't you eat, what did you play, what did you do?" And the child is tired . He'll say something, but he doesn't syllabify either. It's like, "Oh, it was good, who wasn't there, so-and-so was," or we talk about something in traffic. It's only at the end of the meal that he spontaneously has a moment where he says, "Daddy, today this , that, or Mommy, today that ." It's at the end of the meal, after an hour and a half, already... He arrives, has already showered, is sitting eating, is finishing his meal, and it's at that moment, with fruit or something, that he comments on what his day was like. Generally, if you don't have that unproductive hour, you won't get to those 15 or 20 productive minutes of listening to the child about their day. It's very surreal. I see this a lot with my teenagers, okay? Like, teenagers, there are even memes on the internet that say : "In the morning you say good morning, you almost get a slap," right? Literally. But then at night, you're exhausted, I go to bed early, and they want to talk, they want to talk, they want to tell me. And I try to prioritize at least dinner, for us to have dinner together. I don't manage it every day , but I try to organize myself so we can have dinner together. Because I like to cook, I always prepare dinner, and it's the moment when the three of us sit down to eat, and it's the moment when they talk and talk and... They talk, you know, which is the moment when, sometimes, I'm not even in the conversation because they start talking to each other, because so-and-so, because such-and-such teacher, they're close in age, there's a year and a half difference. But then I start to chime in, you know? Oh, because you saw such-and-such, right? A little while later she says: "But come here, explain this story about Vorcário, the ministers of the Supreme Court, I don't know what , right." But why? And then you see that's where the thing comes in, then you say the thing: "My oldest daughter is now studying right-wing." She says: "Mom, I don't understand, I had a class on such-and-such a subject, I don't understand anything, explain it to me." Then the youngest says: "Ah, let me see if I understood." Is it like that, like that? So, it's a moment when that connection really happens. It's the moment when I don't need to ask how their day was, because with teenagers you ask how their day was, how school was, and you get the same answer as everyone else. The days. They say, "It was normal, and you never know if normal was good or bad." But at mealtimes, things flow without me asking; they just start talking, talking, talking. And it's a moment when we have this exchange. And sometimes at bedtime, sometimes I 'm already in bed with my eyes closed, the lights off, and one of them comes in to tell me, "Mom, you won't believe what happened?" And then they come and talk, even about more serious issues, sometimes they ask for advice or want to share their anxieties. So we have to be open to that, and it doesn't just fall from the sky, right? It's a real investment of time and emotional availability. Yes, yes. It is, and up to here I think we've outlined the background, right? The background scenario, everything that's happening, what has transformed and changed to lead to this change that you've seen and measured in the last 10 years, the type of crime, the violence, things changing with this relationship with the internet. Now I wanted to... To anchor this in practical situations or recent events, right? We started by talking about the dog with the ear that suffered violence and was killed, recorded with people posting it on the internet. You said dozens of these happen every day and that there's an explanation, a background to it. Another statement you made at the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Organized Crime, talking about sexual violence against women, saying that all acts of violence against them have a common phenomenon behind them. What are these common phenomena? How is all this now structurally leading to these platforms, this strategy, these boys who went through all this trouble, these parents who are unavailable and dysfunctional? What is this leading to? Where does the problem manifest itself today so that we can then unfold into solutions that solve or don't solve everything we've talked about so far, right? So, I think there's an online radicalization happening, and that many times, I think you can't just blame the internet, right, and just this no-man's-land environment that some platforms have become, right? So, it's a true virtual coliseum, especially since not every teenager falls for the radicalization narrative, right? We also have to look at the causes, which I've already discussed extensively , why some will be attracted and seduced by this violent, extremist discourse, and others won't. Now, the fact is that we have platforms where this content of extreme violence and misogyny, of degrading sex, as happens in industrial pornography, which is misogynistic, violent against women, and degrading, and these red pill discourses, of misogyny, of the male sphere , are being widely hosted and disseminated, finding a stage there, and this is being delivered to increasingly younger boys. So I think we do need regulation of this environment as well, to have an internet that is a minimally civilized place, a minimally civilized place, with the minimum respect and security that one expects from any place. And it's not... That's not what's happening today. There's an environment with so much atrocity that a phenomenon is occurring—a psychic, neurological phenomenon—which is desensitization to violence, right? This has been extensively studied. And we're seeing this in practice; I see a lot of it in practice— an increase, a resurgence of this violence, of cruelty in the way things are done, right? It's never just an insult or just humiliation or just an act of racism or just homophobia. There are always nuances of cruelty, if we can put it that way; there's always something more that makes it much worse, you know? I've witnessed animal torture sessions, and it 's unbelievable, unbelievable. I've been working in the justice system for over 25 years. I've never seen in my life, never heard of, the things I've seen in the last year and a half. It gives me the option to hear this. It's so terrible, so terrible it keeps me awake at night. And I'm already a person who's sensitive to violence because I deal with it all the time. So, for example, I listen to the special testimonies of children who have been raped every week, and then I go home, I have dinner and sleep, because it doesn't keep me awake anymore, even though I find it terrible, I sleep and I live with it. If I couldn't go home and sleep, I couldn't work with this anymore, because I would have already gone crazy. Yes, and what's happening is this desensitization to extreme violence in developing people with still immature brains. So, the brain is being developed and molded, shaped, if I can use a foreign word here, within this logic of "it doesn't hurt." It doesn't bother me to see a cat have its skin ripped off or its eye cut with a blade. It doesn't bother me to see a girl forced to insert a razor blade into her vagina. It does n't bother me to see people eating human flesh or Five-month-old babies being raped live every week, every day. Many of them are in Discord chat rooms every day. And then we're seeing something very frightening. The psychiatric evaluation reports of these teenagers—I have them evaluated very, very frequently—come more or less with the following conclusion: antisocial personality disorder , which is commonly known as psychopathy in adolescence, cannot be diagnosed because it depends on personality formation, which will be around 18, 19, 20 years old. It's a process that hasn't been completed yet. It has n't been completed. So I can't say that he has a personality disorder because his personality is still forming. So what do the reports say? I can't diagnose him yet because he's only 15 or 16 years old. But he already meets the criteria. So he already has all the criteria we need in a person who will be on the path to this. He will be more than just on the path. I already know that. I just can't say for sure yet. In two years, you send me... Okay, I'll come back, I'll evaluate it and I'll say that it is. And this is increasing with a frequency I've never seen before. So, before, if we had a " champinha" (a slang term for a young, often violent, adolescent), a "maniac of the park," now I have, I have at least 15 adolescents in my court alone who are psychopaths, who will be psychopaths, who have no remorse, no regret, who don't have empathy, who take pleasure in the pain of others, who practice sadism with animals and people, and who will kill again as soon as they can . And I'll tell you more, we don't have a legal solution for this case . Because for adults, there's still an adult, a " maniac of the Park of Life," you have the security measure. You can have them in the forensic psychiatric hospital, which is about to close. The CNJ (National Council of Justice) already ordered it closed, but didn't provide a solution. So the decision was kind of "it's going to close, it's going to end," but first we have to find a mechanism to solve this. But you're telling me that the person who shouldn't be living in society, look, but for adolescents... There are no safety measures. There's no provision for psychiatric hospitalization for an adolescent until they progress in treatment and can return to living in society. But, and I can't really tell you, to what extent have I studied this, tried to understand it, I've studied mental health a lot, right? I think if there were a psychiatry faculty independent of medicine, I would even enroll , because I increasingly need these skills in my work. But what I've understood, and I think if you interview a psychiatrist later, it's worth revisiting this topic, is that we don't really know what causes personality disorders. We don't even know if it's just genetic factors in the sense that the person is born with an irreversible predisposition or if it's something that happens in early childhood. But what we do know is that there's an alteration in a specific area of ​​the brain responsible for empathy, that it's different, and that the person can't feel empathy or remorse. Well, not everyone who doesn't feel empathy is like that. Empathy and remorse will torture a cat or kill someone. But you now have a system that channels people towards that, right? Except now we have teenagers , and even children, being exposed to content that causes this insensitivity. And I ask them: "What did you feel when you were there, I don't know, cutting off the dog's paws ?" And they say: "I didn't feel anything." I don't feel anything. I don't feel pity, but I also don't feel pleasure, but I also don't feel pity. I don't feel anything. It's difficult, you know? Difficult. Because what do we do when she feels, after 13 years, that she doesn't feel anything anymore? So I don't believe in a solution that does n't involve changing this. Therefore, it's not possible for us to continue with this scenario. Discord specifically, which is the place that provides a stage for all of this nowadays, what used to happen, as I said 5 years ago on Dark, on the web, now happens on Discord, in Discord cliques, uh, it's almost an anthropological experiment. So, if we were to do the following experiment, let's take a group of people, I don't know, the representative from Discord once told me that they have 200 million accesses per month. So, let's say we take 100,000 people and conduct an experiment with them. There are no rules, no consequences, no limits. You can do whatever you want. And we'll see how far these people are willing to go. What are the ethical limits of their actions? How will they coexist without rules, where nothing is forbidden, there are no consequences for what you do, and there are no limits to anything? And you do everything anonymously without anyone knowing it was you . How far are you capable of going? Well, we already have this anthropological experiment happening, it's called Discord, and we know how far people are capable of going, okay? We are seeing there the very peculiar characteristic that 90% of the users are children and teenagers, not even adults. The few adults we have there are 19, 20, 21 years old, young adults still with adolescent brains. If we consider it from the point of view of neurological development, the prefrontal cortex is still immature. Well, uh, I'm speechless, right? Yes yes . So, it's one thing to take a case-by-case approach, but it's quite another to say, "No, we have an island of 100,000 inhabitants here, all children, each one for themselves, without consequences." right? And regarding another issue, which is sexual violence, I bring up this topic as well because there's something you said that really struck me. You mentioned that many people are looking for sex education online and end up falling into this trap, because up until now we've discussed something that affects boys more, or girls more often, when they are involved, they are more likely to be victims. As victims. Perfect. They're going to focus on where they are most vulnerable, where they are the victims, that's the goal of the whole thing, right? So, when you say, well, uh, whoever goes online is going to fall for this? Or someone who comes looking for information on anatomy and sex education will stumble upon porn videos and learn about it far too early. I want to ask at what age this will happen and to what extent this leads us to understand that perhaps sex education in schools, for example, is a strategy that has to happen alongside the strategy of holding networks accountable and other things, which is where we'll be discussing this in a moment, okay? So, we have research—I'm not going to tell you the exact source because I'm really bad with names and numbers like that—but I know there's research that was done on this, specifically in Brazil, that says the average age at which children first come into contact with industrial pornography is 9 years old, on average , 9 years old for the first contact. And they have this first contact without seeking out pornography, by chance, looking for other information, like sex education, how babies are made, what the size of a penis is, how reproduction works, doing a school project. Then you click once, twice, and on the third click it opens a porn site that will have a box saying: "Are you 18 years old?" Then you click that it's there. And in the next scene you have a woman having sex with 10 men. being subjugated and violated and humiliated and with all the characteristics that we know are present in this type of pornography. And then this child often gets excited seeing this scene, because sexual arousal is something natural, right? It won't happen in a conscious way. And then she begins to have a frame of reference for what pleasure is, what sexual relations are, and how this sexual relationship should be developed, that is very divorced from reality. Because we're talking about children aged 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, young people, children and teenagers who haven't had their first sexual experience, who don't know what a touch is, what a French kiss that gives you goosebumps is, and how this mating dance between a man and a woman works. And, sorry, this is going to happen later and later, given the trends of recent years, right? Look, I spoke this week with a psychologist who specializes in sex therapy, and what he told me is like this: it makes you want to shut down, turn off the lights, and leave planet Earth, because he said that men, even from adolescence up to now, those who are already 40 years old, right? They were once teenagers, men who were teenagers when Tadala Fila emerged. So, what did he explain to me? So, today the boy is already starting his sex life, he's already starting to use Viagra, Atadala Fila, because he's afraid he won't be able to maintain an erection for as long as he thinks he should, because he sees in movies that men last two hours with anabolic steroids, and other things like that. AND . So what happens then? Tadalafil has an effect that makes erections much faster and lasts much longer, and it doesn't require arousal to occur. So you don't need the touch of a dance there, like, she kind of sensitizes everything that should be happening around the thing. Exactly. Exactly. You already... you mean the man already gets an erection without needing stimulation. The stimulant is the drug itself. But over time, this causes him to lose his erection, he loses sensitivity, right? After a while it stops working, it doesn't succeed anymore. But then he never learned how to do that. He never learned how to do it, and over the years, decades of using it, it continues to have an effect. It's as if it creates a habit and then it no longer has any effect. That's why they go to the urologist, because they're having trouble getting an erection. And then the doctor starts saying, "Oh, let's try this, try that. Nothing works. What does he suggest? A penile prosthesis." So they get the penile prosthesis early, at 40 years old, which is early, right? An age that , in theory, shouldn't be associated with erectile dysfunction. And then they start having erections because they have the prosthesis, but they can't ejaculate because they don't have orgasms, they don't reach pleasure because there's no arousal. In reality, it's a fake erection that doesn't result from arousal. And then they go to therapy, right? And as he was telling me this, I said, "Wow, what a horrible life this is for everyone, right?" You go through a whole life without knowing what real sex is, right? And this often stems from early exposure to pornography, which has a different effect on girls and boys. Girls are also being greatly harmed by this, because they too are gaining access to it. It's different from the '80s, '90s again. Many people will talk about it, just like the story of bullying. Ah, but pornography has always existed and there has always been pornography consumption by teenagers, just like there were Faces of Death available for rent at the video store. But that doesn't mean there's a big difference between what happened back in the '80s and '90s and what we have today? Because back in the day, for a boy, first of all, there was something that was very much a boyish thing, right? The girls consumed very little pornography; it was a much more common consumption among boys. For a boy to get a pornographic video, he had to go to the video store, find an older cousin there , or an older friend, or the guy at the video store who would turn a blind eye, get a movie that would stay at someone's house for a week, and everyone would go there to watch it, and they would watch the same movie 500 times, and it was always the same story, that that was all there was . So, access to the content was much, much less plentiful and much less diverse , right? The difference between drinking beer and drinking cachaça, or between using coca leaves and crack cocaine, is of varying degrees. AND . So what happens today? One click can reveal anything you can imagine, and even things you never thought possible are there. Thanks to Iá himself. And then he watches something for 15 seconds and says, "Oh no, I didn't like this one very much." Then it goes to another, and to another, and to another, and to another. So this creates awareness and becomes addictive, okay? And pornography, and this use of pornography in this way, it's very addictive, like online gambling, like social media with its algorithms, like vaping—it's no wonder that these are the addictions that these young people move between, right? Swap one for another, then another, then another. If you put down your cell phone, you'll be vaping before long . He smoked a little bit of vape, then he'll pick up his phone again in a bit, and so it goes. So that's the first problem, there's a desensitization. Secondly, I compare pornography to ultra-processed foods. So, if you take a child, your 5-year-old son, who I'm assuming doesn't eat ultra-processed foods, right? His father, a biologist, was caring and conscientious, and then he spent a month at his grandmother's house eating a lot of junk food , a lot of filled cookies—because I say cookies because I'm from Rio—and boxed juice with artificial coloring and lots of sugar. Well, that's about it . When you get back home and give him a mango, he won't want to eat it because nothing in nature, no food in nature, will be as stimulating to his taste buds as those foods that aren't real, full of chemicals, which are overstimulating to his palate. The day he drinks soda, he wo n't accept water at lunch like he does now. The same thing happens in pornography. A real sexual relationship, with real bodies, with real touch, with what happens between two people when they have sex, will never have the level of stimulation that industrial pornography has . Then real sex starts to become very boring. Imagine a boy from the 50s or 60s, he'd see a girl's ankle and get an erection. Back in the '80s, when everyone was already wearing miniskirts, maybe seeing her ankle wasn't enough; if she gave him a French kiss, he'd already get an erection. Nowadays, they can't even get an erection during sex without medication, because nothing is as stimulating as the drug they use, which is citra, which is industrial pornography. It's very sad, okay? I have two girls, and I feel so sad for them as they grow up and begin their lives, you know, their emotional lives in this world. Then we have the problem that they receive a parameter, a standard from this industrial pornography that women like to be disrespected, hurt, insulted, violated. And they reproduce this in their relationships. The girls themselves, when they frequently consume pornography, often come to believe that this is the way to relate, to order hitting, to order hurting, to want. I've had many cases of girls who wanted to have group sex, and then sometimes by the last person she was too tired and didn't want to anymore, and then she was raped by the last one, even though she had consensual sex with four others, you understand? So, where does this story come from, this fetish of group sex involving 14- year-old girls? So, this comes from pornography, right? And that's why we often see this migrating from the screen, from that environment that would only exist in fantasy, to real life, to the real world. So, we've had many cases of rape among teenagers who are classmates, who are friends, who spend time together, who study at the same school, who have mutual friends at parties. Yeah, and I'm even in favor of collectives. It 's no coincidence that you're having this discussion happening in a school group, debating who is more likely to be raped, right? When you say, "Look, a group that's listed as having a list of the most rapeable girls," what are they saying, in my opinion, are they saying who are the girls I'd like to sleep with, who I'd like to have sex with, right? That they are beautiful, that they are desirable, that they have a beautiful body, and so on. But today, "it to rape" has become synonymous with "I want to have sex with her." How? The way I learned to do it. Women like being raped, do n't they? So, you look at the search criteria for pornography websites, and you see that number one in Brazil is "novinha" (young girl). Young girl, sex supervised, right? Like this. So having sex with a young girl is rape, right? A girl under 14 years old, which is what they call a " young girl," is considered rape. So it's the number one search criterion for what men consume in pornography. I'm going to, finally, the role of father here is, is, is triggering me a lot. I'm going to seize the opportunity, then. So, while we're recording, the Digital ECA, the Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents, has just been announced. I wanted to hear from you, who deals with the other end, what it means to feel the lack of something or not. How do you see this? Is it a solution, or could it become a solution? As someone who's somewhat internet-savvy, I understand that this is a time of hysteria, a time when people are talking about something that isn't happening, exaggerating consequences that don't necessarily relate to what will actually occur. And we've already experienced several LGPD resolutions, and other draft laws as well. This concept of law that sticks in Brazil is quite complicated. So I know that as a law that is being approved right now and that doesn't have mechanisms for many of the things that are being proposed there, it seems to me that if it is applied, if it is applied well, it can become a great tool, like Pix, which is a digital transfer tool, but it wasn't applied neutrally, it was applied as an infrastructure thing for everyone to have access to. We've had other businesses around here before. So, how do you see the digital ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents), and what would be the critical points that need to be applied correctly or incorrectly to solve some of the problems we've seen so far? And what gets left out? Parents, for example, or other things that are not covered by this. And thinking about what's on the outside, what are we lacking as parents in terms of digital literacy, or what should our role be beyond being present and functional, you know? So, what do we need to learn how to do to achieve that? Because much of what the ECA (Brazilian Statute of Children and Adolescents) proposes, the parental control of the Apple system, the iPhone, things like that, theoretically does, or YouTube Kids does, which is to have a way to restrict what the child has access to by age, for this reason, for that reason, with a password, blah blah blah. So, theoretically, there's a lot there that could be in the system, could be easily implemented, and would take the responsibility off parents to do it. How much else do we need to learn from this? Or ECA could embrace these things so you could have, for example, a system where the child enters and everything there already knows it 's a child without you having to give them their data. So, uh, about the digital ECA, right? So, the Digital ECA is considered not only by me, but by several experts around the world. Well, it's the most modern and cutting-edge law in what it proposes, which is the protection of children and adolescents in the digital environment. Come on, he doesn't have a world-class example, right? Several countries around the world are currently studying Brazil's digital ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents) and considering how we can replicate it and implement it in our legal systems. England is doing this, several American states, Australia, several countries, France, countries that are focusing on this issue, are looking at the digital ECA (Brazilian Statute for Children and Adolescents) and we are already entering as a leading country along with Australia, Indonesia and other countries that are already advanced in this protection. So, what's the logic behind the digital ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents), which I think is more important than knowing exactly what measures it proposes? There are interesting things, and it's about understanding the logic. The logic of the ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents) changes the whole way we view the digital environment, which is what we had until now, right? Since the time of the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights), we had a logic that went like this: "Look, the internet will self-regulate, it will have its own ethics, and they will self-regulate. It's a place, a space of freedom of expression, a free territory that we don't have to regulate. It's the public square." And until now, it's more than just the public square. Public squares have rules, okay? You can't do whatever you want in the public square. And until now, there wasn't any law, any legal rule in Brazil that held the platforms, the big tech companies, responsible for what happens in the digital environment. The platforms always said: "Look, I don't do anything, I'm just a vehicle, right?" It's the user who's putting the content there, supplying it with content. I only host content that is produced by third parties. So I'm not responsible because the third party put it there. What we know is that it's a fallacy, because it's one thing for a third person to be there on the corner shouting, and that's a racist statement. Another thing is that he'd put this on a channel that has 50 million followers on YouTube, for example, and the platform would choose to deliver that more than success. I'm not going to get into that aspect, okay? Even though the platform was super innocent, nice, it's this amplifier of the voice of certain things, right? So she needs to be held accountable. Because imagine this: I like to compare it to television. Imagine if someone rented airtime on Rede Globo, during prime time between the 9 pm soap opera, and bought 30 seconds of advertising to promote Nazism. Nobody would say, "But Globo has nothing to do with this. Globo only received the money from advertising, but the one who promoted Nazism was the one who hired them." It's unthinkable to think like that . Or if Globo showed a scene of a baby being tortured or raped during prime time, right? Oh, but it's only for subscribers. But Globo didn't do anything. The one who did was the one who raped the baby. It's kind of the logic of big tech companies. And we know that did n't work. This hope that they would self-regulate ethically did n't work. They have no ethics. And the biggest proof that they have no ethics is that, in addition to everything that happens, the algorithm intentionally delivers harmful content to children and teenagers, for example, content about self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders to girls aged 12 and 13. Content, as we saw in the book by the former Meta executive, Careless People, she says that the algorithm knows if a girl took a selfie and... He deleted it because he assumes she thought she was ugly and starts offering her makeup, skincare, and things like that. Besides these abusive practices, right, these unfair and unethical practices, what do the executives, the titans of Big Tech, do? "My son doesn't use screens." Everyone's talking about this, right? They don't let their children use them. So the ethical thing is, "My children are out of this danger. I don't care about the other children. I'm not committed to creating a safer and more protected environment for children." But we have rules, we have laws in Brazil. And the rule, perhaps the biggest, most important one we have, is a rule that's in the Federal Constitution, in article 227, which did nothing more than take that old African proverb known to all of us, that it takes a whole village to raise a child, and transform that into a constitutional norm, that it is the duty of the family, the state, and society to care for children, protect them, and guarantee their rights, okay? So, if it is It's everyone's duty, what does the Digital ECA do? It says the following: "It is the duty of everyone who participates in this virtual village, this digital village, especially those people who are there to make money from it." They are not there by circumstantial means. They are there because they developed, created, and chose this as their business model. My business model is to create a digital environment that can be used by everyone, including children and teenagers, and to become a billionaire doing it. Therefore, anyone who decides to work professionally in this field has an obligation to design a product that is safer. So, what does the ECA do? It brings this obligation of security by design, from the very beginning, from the moment an architect—I don't know how an IT engineer at Meta or TikTok—sits down and thinks : "What changes are we going to implement on Instagram this year ?" "Or I'll create a new social network." The first thing I have to keep in mind is, what do I need to do to make this place safe for children and teenagers? It's kind of like what an engineer does when they design, an architect, an engineer designs a playground in a square that will be frequented by children, or a food court, or a play area in a shopping mall or a condominium like those you mentioned that have a playground, uh, a playroom. What do I need to do here? What is the maximum height of this slide so that a child can fall without breaking their neck and dying? What kind of material should I use so that there is n't a splinter, a metal point that could cut the child when they slide down? I have to think about the safety of the user, the child, like the cars today that have Isofix and other things. Seat belt. I think the seatbelt is a great example, right? When seat belts became mandatory, cars in the past were not required to be manufactured with seat belts. When it became mandatory, all car manufacturers filed a lawsuit to avoid being required to include seat belts, saying: "It has nothing to do with that, that's the driver's problem ." And there were experts saying it was better not to have a seatbelt because you can get out of the car, because the child doesn't need to be restrained, and if they fall into the river you won't always be able to. That's always the story, isn't it? I've gotten into cars with taxi drivers who said, "I don't wear a seatbelt because if I fall into the sea, I might get trapped in it, right?" So, what is Leiv going to do? She's going to tell the park owner that the park needs streetlights, a security guard at the entrance, a fence, and that they need to check the ID of everyone entering the park, since you're the one charging admission and getting rich because you own a park. Therefore, the primary responsibility for creating a safe digital environment for children falls on the big tech companies. And we're going to have several rules, such as a ban on profiling, a ban on endless scrolling, on autoplay in videos, on emotional content, and on the algorithm, which means that if you don't have profiling, you can't have the algorithm suggesting content. So, the question remains: "But how will Big Tech manage to comply with the law, you know? And how will it, because for that it needs to know that the user is not an adult. How will it manage to comply with the law, to protect and treat children and adolescents differently from how it treats adults? It needs to verify the user's age. So there's a mechanism that, for me, is essential. We can't move forward if we don't implement this mechanism. This is challenging, okay? Which is age verification. Why is it challenging ? Not because there's no technology. Of course there's technology. They already know everyone's age, right? The algorithm suggests things to my daughters that it does n't suggest to me. Jonathan Heides' team did an experiment, I don't know if you've seen it, very interesting. They filmed and posted it on Hide's Instagram, they created a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl on Instagram and liked some content to guide the algorithm. Content that this fake girl liked, videos of cute kittens doing cute things. What did the Logically, what should the algorithm deliver? Videos of kittens, pandas, puppies, birds. What did it start delivering to this 13-year-old girl? Virgue for weight loss, skincare, and exercise. So, they know she's a 13- year-old girl with image issues, like all 13-year-olds have, and they're even directing her to content about anorexia, bulimia, etc. So, BigTec has to do age verification, but how? The law says they can create their own criteria, okay? And there's a working group that's already been completed at the Ministry of Justice, also creating a mechanism that can be used by any small provider of this IT service who doesn't have the means to create their own verification, which of course the big players, like Meta, TikTok, Roblox, X, they can do. But then suddenly Mr. João from the bakery who delivers, he has to know that the person ordering is a minor, so he can't... Delivering beer and alcohol. So how will they verify age? They won't have that tool, but they can use the official government tool in the same way they ask for an ID card. In the same way they ask for an ID card and in the same way we already have technology, for example, for banks, where when you enter the bank's app, it does facial recognition. On govbr. When you sell a car today to transfer it at the Detran (Brazilian traffic department), you do the transfer online, it knows that you are you, and, in short, technology is what we have the most of, right? We're going to have a discussion about digital security with good and bad ways of verifying this kind of thing soon . Yes. And the law itself says that the only data collection that can happen is to verify age, nothing more. You can't store this data for other purposes, you can't do advertising directed at children, you can't do profiling. And what's so incredible about this law ? It's the sanctions, the punishments for big tech companies when they violate the law, right? There's an obligation for automatic removal of Violent content, for example, content related to pedophilia, sexual abuse, or suicide, is subject to automatic removal. Other harmful content must be removed as soon as a notification is received, regardless of any court order. And who needs to notify, who can notify, doesn't have to be the victim; it could be, for example, a child and adolescent protection organization that sees a dangerous challenge happening. An Instituto Alana da Vida or a Cfernet can notify, and they are obligated to take it down. Platforms with more than 1 million users are required to submit semi-annual reports to the NPD, which will be the supervisory authority. The semi-annual reports should proportionally detail how many complaints they received and the progress they made. So, what happens today is that you report, report, report, report, and they just throw the report away. That won't be possible anymore . They will have to say: "Look, I received so many complaints, so many were investigated, I removed them." "Content, I did n't remove it, what did I do?" And we're going to have a central, a national complaints center, which would be the equivalent of the Brazilian Nickelodeon, headed by Rafaela Parca, a federal delegate, who will receive complaints from big tech companies when the content is criminal, to investigate and punish those responsible. National Data Protection Agency, something like that, or is it the same? No, we have the National Data Protection Agency, which will be the autonomous supervisory authority that the law mentions, it's the NPD. And then, in addition to the NPD, with this supervisory function, we will have the National Center for the Protection of Children and Adolescents, which is an agency that will be managed by the Federal Police, which is very good, because the Federal Police already does this today, right? But then this will be concentrated in one agency for this purpose that will receive the investigated complaints from big tech companies and will forward them. So, big tech companies receive a complaint, it could be a complaint about content that is... Harmful, but not criminal, I don't know, it's a challenge that puts someone at risk. Or it could be the deodorant challenge. The deodorant challenge, but like, no, nobody died, so in theory there's no crime, just content that needs to be removed. Or it could be like this: "Look, there's a picture here of a baby being raped." And then this content, which is criminal, they send it to this central protection center, with all the user's data already gathered, the email or IP of the device, the server, everything that can be gathered from the data, right, for the investigation, they 'll send it all processed to the Federal Police to conclude the investigation and forward it to the justice system. We have four sanctions in the law for when Bigtec fails to comply with the dictates of the digital ECA, right? And one of these sanctions is something very important, which is a fine that can reach up to R$ 50 million in each case of non-compliance. And Why is this so important? Because it's all about the money. So, I'll tell you a story. I met with a legal representative from Discord about a year and a half ago at a meeting at the Ministry of Justice, and he mentioned Discord's data. He said they have about 200 million accesses per month and 80 employees worldwide. 80 employees to monitor 200 million accesses. He didn't say what the company's profit was, but I researched it online and saw that the previous year the company had made billions of reais. So, of course, the company makes 32 billion reais because they don't need to hire employees, they have no responsibility, so they do n't care what happens there. But now they have responsibility. So now, every time they allow, for example, children or teenagers to access these pots of extreme violence, they will be breaking the law, because the law says it's the responsibility of Big Tech, not the parents, to prevent children or teenagers from receiving inappropriate content. For their age. It's not criminal content like pornography or... pornography that's prohibited, right? Delivering pornography to minors is the crime of exposing them to pornography. It's not just pornography and online gambling that have restrictions; any inappropriate content is. So, it could even be content allowed for teenagers, but not for that age group. So, for example, you have content that can be viewed by those over 14, over 16, and then you have a 10-year-old child receiving it. That violates the law. Each violation of the ECA (Brazilian Statute of Children and Adolescents) digital regulations can lead to a fine of up to R$ 50 million. And then it starts to become cheaper for Big Tech to hire content moderators, invest in preventative technology, and lose that user than to pay 50 million reais every time there's a violation, okay? I 'm saying this because we saw this happen in the consumer market when the Consumer Code came out in 1990, right? I don't know if you remember, I wasn't even in college yet, but... I remember the changes in the consumer market. Things didn't change the day after the Consumer Code came into effect , but they did change. How did they change? With court decisions condemning banks, prohibiting certain abusive practices, and condemning health insurance plans. For example, the regulation of age brackets in health insurance plans. Before, when you got older, you know, when you had a birthday, the plan would increase by 200%, and people couldn't afford it anymore. They used this to get people to leave the plan so they could reduce the risk. That's no longer allowed. So this was regulated by the judiciary through an application, an interpretation of the Consumer Code. So I think, I think, no, I'm sure, I have no doubt that the law will take hold, to use your words. The law has been in effect since March 17, 2026. This means that at any moment a fine can be applied by the NPD (National Consumer Protection Authority) if it's already being violated. And what I've been reading in my groups is that I... I have several activist groups for children, and for example, pornography websites continue to only validate access based on self-declaration of age. This cannot happen; there needs to be age verification on pornography websites to prevent access by minors under 18. And so , I think that as it starts to hurt their wallets a lot, they will understand that Brazil is a serious country with a serious justice system. And I'm saying this seriously because I'm part of that justice system. Twitter shows this happening. Exactly. And so, the truth is that it hurt their wallets, it hurt them a lot, they seized and blocked money from big tech companies' accounts. The solution will happen, I have no doubt they will adapt, right? It takes a while, it will take some time for them to adapt. I even think the law foresaw a one-year grace period, and this period was brought forward to six months when it was sanctioned by the presidency. I think that was more for political reasons, it was an election year. Right? It's important political capital , isn't it? To please families, but anyway, they will adapt, and families are not exempt from any responsibility under the law, right? What the ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents) does is tell the authorities: "Look, you have to make the parents' job easier, it's very difficult." Single, overwhelmed parents. Therefore, all parental controls must be available in Portuguese, regardless of where the platform is located. It has to be easy. Well, the default protection needs to be as protective as possible so that parents can remove layers of protection and not need to add anything. In other words, the child downloaded the app, did nothing, and is as protected as possible. All the layers are there. There's no need to hunt around in the settings to figure out how to improve it. Oh, another cool thing is that Big Tech companies are required to create digital literacy programs for everyone—for children, teenagers, families, educators, the government, for everyone. They taught everyone how to use the iPhone, they taught everyone how to use AI, they taught everyone how to use Instagram, why shouldn't we teach them how to use this? And besides, they're the ones who make the profit, right? So, whoever has the benefits must also bear the burdens. So, if you make money from this, you have to , I think it's actually almost a variation of the consumer code, the right to inform, the duty to put a safe product on the market, all of that is in the consumer code. If we only applied the consumer code, we would already have a lot covered. But the law is wonderful, it's much more specific, it brings with it this duty, this duty of shared care, right? The law strongly emphasizes this shared responsibility, which belongs to everyone, including the platforms, families, the government, and the authorities. Everyone is obligated, society is obligated to take care of the children. Well, the Oscars were recently held, and the director who won the Oscar for best foreign film, the Danish director, spoke about this, saying: "It is the duty of all adults to take care of all children." And that's it , that's the logic of the village, that 's the logic of the Federal Constitution, of the Digital ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents). And I like to paraphrase this to get to the end, this well-known African saying, which states that it takes a whole village to protect children in the digital world. Great. And for those who want to learn more about this, to prepare themselves, where can we follow along, follow your work, or what groups do you recommend for those who leave here motivated? So, for anyone who wants to follow me, I have a professional social media account which is Instagram @protocoloeutivejo. This is my professional Instagram account. Sometimes people ask to follow me on personal social media, but I don't allow it because it's purely personal; there's nothing work-related about it. Yeah, and I recommend several influencers who talk about parenting, about safety in the digital environment; there's even a post about it. So, Sheili, who is an influencer who talks a lot about digital safety for children and teenagers, Daniel Becker, a pediatrician from Rio de Janeiro, from the Alana Institute, Seifernet, there are so many people, I don't even want to name them all because I'll end up forgetting someone and it would be unfair, but there are many people talking about this, with very good content, and that's it. Knowledge truly protects. And thank you for the shock and also for the reality of understanding how all of this is tied together and what we can do. It was a privilege. Thanks. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I can't even say "liked" here. It had been a long time since I'd dealt with a subject that weighed on me this much and that brings with it another responsibility as a father, which I think we all have to assume together here. I sincerely hope that the Digital ECA and other solutions will at least address this problem . And I know that everything has to unfold in a certain way. And I promise to bring other discussions here for non- fiction purposes, so we can understand how, why, and what is happening around children, adolescents, violence, and how these tools can be designed and applied in a way that is good and productive for everyone. If you want to follow this discussion and its developments, subscribe to the channel here. This way you receive regular videos and non-fiction content, always made by humans for humans. Until next time.