Terça Livre

» see tercalivre.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The slogan was a hashtag, and the hashtag was #contraafakenews. Against fake news. In November 2019 the Brazilian congress named Terça Livre in the CPMI das Fake News, the joint inquiry into disinformation, and by then its output had already been through the checkers: a 2018 story claiming a gang had been caught withdrawing sixty eight million reais for the Haddad campaign was rated false by Estadão Verifica and by Boatos.org. That gap between the slogan and the record is the whole shape of this grave, and I am not the one who established it. Brazilian fact-checking organizations did, in public, with citations.

Allan dos Santos and Italo Lorenzon started it in 2014 as a conservative news portal, following the ideas of Olavo de Carvalho, and it grew into a video operation. Live programs, commentary, a Telegram channel, and a following that ran through the Bolsonaro family. It described itself as the largest conservative portal outside the United States.

The numbers it reached were real. In April 2021 the Terça Livre TV channel on YouTube had 1.2 million subscribers, and a February 2021 survey by the checking agency Aos Fatos found it was the biggest bolsonarista channel on Telegram by subscribers and by total views. Court filings from July 2021 put eight thousand paying members and around fifty employees behind it.

This one is a Brazilian argument and I watched none of it. The format travels, in the sense that plenty of countries now have partisan video channels that people watch in place of the news, but the specifics do not travel at all: the names and the courts belong to one country, and so does a fight over one exhibition in Porto Alegre. I have no memory to bring to this and no standing in it. What I can do is get the sequence right, because the sequence is the interesting part.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

The clearest single demonstration of what the channel could do came on 9 September 2017, against an art exhibition called Queermuseu at Santander Cultural in Porto Alegre. Terça Livre published a video calling the show criminal, with a caption accusing the culture ministry of promoting obscenity in front of children and asking viewers to rate the venue one star and share the video. It reached 1,638,153 views before it came down. Researchers who studied the campaign afterwards found roughly thirteen percent of the accounts in the resulting pile-on were automated. The exhibition closed on 10 September.

After the 2018 election the access followed. In January 2019 Terça Livre was one of the friendly outlets given free movement at Bolsonaro's inauguration, while journalists from other publications reported being restricted. A Poder360 count of the president's official diary for 2019 and 2020 put it sixth among all press organizations by number of meetings with him.

~ the takedowns ~

Twitter suspended the account in November 2019 for terms violations. In January 2021 the activist group Sleeping Giants asked the pharmacy chain Droga Raia to stop advertising on the YouTube channel and the chain pulled its ads. On 4 February 2021 YouTube terminated both channels, Terça Livre TV and Terça Livre Live, for repeated violations, and Terça Livre blamed the Sleeping Giants campaign directly.

Then the courts went back and forth. On 12 February a São Paulo judge ruled the removal disproportionate and ordered YouTube to restore the channels under a five thousand real daily fine, calling the block a violation of free expression. They came back on 2 March, visible only inside Brazil. On 15 July a judge ruled against the channel again and it went down, and an injunction put it back on the 21st. On 12 October 2021 the supreme court closed the loop: justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the accounts suspended as part of the inquiry into digital militias and incitement, and the Facebook and Instagram accounts went the same way as the YouTube ones.

Moraes also ordered the arrest and extradition of Allan dos Santos, along with the freezing of his bank accounts. He was in the United States, and he stayed there.

~ what the domain did next ~

Lorenzon posted the ending himself, on 22 October 2021: "Hoje, 22/10/2021 o Terça Livre encerrou suas atividades. Muito obrigado a todos." Today Terça Livre has ended its activities, thank you all very much, and he added that he would keep making videos on his personal channel as he had been doing for months. The reasons given were censorship and the loss of financial support. Dos Santos put it more plainly on a livestream: absolute bankruptcy, from demonetization and blocked bank accounts. Much of the press reported the closure on the 23rd, and the English record has drifted to that date, but the post is dated the 22nd and says so in its own first four words.

The domain then had an afterlife with nobody living in it. For years tercalivre.com.br answered requests with a permanent redirect to a Substack called Revista Exílio, which is where dos Santos publishes from the United States, and the archive shows it still doing that in July 2025. Sometime in the last year it stopped. Today the name does not resolve at all: no address, no redirect, nothing to point at the exile.

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