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The fate of a controversial bill to clean up social media in Brazil is uncertain.

The Brazilian Congress has postponed a vote on Bill 2630, also known as the Fake News Law, which would make digital platforms, search engines, and internet companies responsible for flagging and removing illegal content.

Platforms that fail to comply with the law may face hefty fines.

Evangelical lawmakers and tech companies such as Google and Meta have voiced their opposition to the bill, saying it will end up "protecting those who produce misinformation" as platforms will be unable to remove posts that reproduce false claims.

Discussion on the regulation of digital platforms has gained momentum in the country after two attacks in schools in which five people were killed, and the Jan. 8 rampage on government buildings.

Last week, messaging app Telegram was temporarily banned in Brazil after a court ruled the company failed to provide data on two neo-Nazi groups accused of inciting violence in schools.

The federal police reportedly requested the phones numbers of administrators and members of those groups.

On its Twitter account, the company said the court had requested "technologically unobtainable data". A judge removed the ban after the company appealed the decision.

Rest of the world: what’s new?

USA

Avi Asher-Schapiro, U.S. tech correspondent

Canadian researcher Geoff Hinton, whose pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks earned him the nickname “the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence", has resigned from his post at Google.

In an interview with the New York Times published this week, Hinton expressed some regret for the technology his research helped to advance, saying that the advent of generative AI products like ChatGPT may lead to a crisis where humanity will "not be able to know what is true anymore".

Africa

Kim Harrisberg, South Africa correspondent

Zimbabwe announced that it will launch a digital currency next month backed by gold reserves that can be used for payments.

This decision comes after years-long depreciation of the country's Zimbabwe dollar, spurred on by hyperinflation - which reached 5 billion percent in 2008 - sanctions and policy mismanagement.

The digital currency aims to allow those with even small amounts of money to transact, to stabilise the fragile currency and offer alternatives to desperate consumers.

Europe

Adam Smith, UK correspondent

British retailer Sports Direct is in a battle over its use of facial recognition cameras in its stores after members of parliament signed a letter against it.

50 MPs and peers opposed the use of live face-recognition using the Facewatch system, which they say "treats everyone who passes the camera like a potential criminal".

Campaign groups Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Privacy International also criticised its use, arguing that it showed false positives and a bias against women and ethnic minorities.

Facewatch says the system is proven to prevent crime, and Sports Direct's parent company Frasers Group said its use is necessary.

Asia

Vidhi Doshi, India correspondent

No country will face AI-related employment upheaval like India – where a $220-billion IT services industry has been a major engine of social and economic change for the past three decades.

This week in an interview with Bloomberg News, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna announced a global hiring freeze while it explores how it could replace 7,800 jobs with AI.

Krishna said the company's hiring pause would mainly affect back-office functions such as human resources and administrative roles which will be replaced by AI in the next five years.

See our past reporting about the tech sector in India, and the effect AI is going to have on workers in the global south.