قبل جولة الإعادة في الانتخابات البرازيلية، حُكم بأن توصيات Meta لقنوات بولسونارو مخالفة للقانون، وأموال الإعلانات الأجنبية تضيف بُعدًا جديدًا إلى جدل المساءلة

وفقًا لما نقلته Africanews نقلًا عن Associated Press، أصدرت المحكمة للانتخابات في البرازيل حكمين يتعلقان بسلوك Meta في التوزيع خلال الانتخابات:-platform must treat the incumbent president, Lula, and the opposition candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, equally; and providing algorithmic recommendations to Bolsonaro’s Instagram and WhatsApp channels constitutes an violation of the law.raised by Lula’s campaign alleges that Meta favored Bolsonaro through a biased algorithm and AI-based restrictions; Meta denies practicing political favoritism in the Brazilian election.

Meta attributed recent platform issues to global technical glitches unrelated to targeted suppression, strict anti-fraud measures, and regulatory compliance, and maintained that its systems do not distribute content according to political ideology and that the rules apply equally to all candidates. According to the report, Meta did not directly explain why the two Bolsonaro channels received algorithmic recommendations. The company cited two global technical disruptions in October: one froze view counts for Instagram Reels in more than 100 countries, although content delivery remained normal; the other temporarily interrupted a tool’s ability to create advertisements based on existing Instagram posts. These incidents explain platform functionality problems, but do not answer the court’s question about recommendations for campaign channels.

On October 19, a group of protesters demonstrated outside Meta’s offices in São Paulo, accusing the company of interfering in Brazil’s presidential election. October 25 was the voting day in the runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro.

Another line of accountability comes from research by NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The study says that Meta allowed at least 1,613 politically non-compliant advertisements to run between July and September, accumulating 171 million views and generating approximately 2 million reais in revenue, with funding for the ads coming primarily from the United States. The report did not disclose the study methodology, raw data, or margin of error; these figures are results published by the study and do not constitute final findings by Brazilian judicial authorities on each advertisement.

Marie Santini, a professor of communications who participated in the study, cited Brazilian rules as saying: "In Brazil, no entity outside political parties, candidates, or alliances is permitted to purchase electoral advertisements." She further argued: "Regardless of whether they originate inside or outside Brazil, no company should be able to purchase advertisements on Meta to promote electoral activities." These are the positions of researchers participating in the study and do not amount to a judicial determination concerning cross-border purchasing.

The controversy therefore goes beyond whether a single recommendation complied with the rules. Brazilian rules limit the entities permitted to purchase electoral advertisements to parties, candidates, and alliances, while NetLab says the related funding came primarily from the United States. The platform’s global advertising accounts, payment verification, and content distribution have consequently become unavoidable links in electoral accountability. Meta both decides whether advertisements can run and earns revenue from their distribution, while advertisers seek political reach, bringing the tension between the platform’s interests and electoral neutrality into focus.

Existing reporting does not indicate that Meta intentionally sought to help any candidate win, but this does not eliminate institutional responsibility: who is eligible to purchase advertisements, which advertisements were allowed to run, and why particular campaign channels received recommendations are all information controlled by the platform and difficult for external overseers to verify. The Brazilian election court has already ruled that the recommendations in question were unlawful. Ahead of October 25, what now needs to be tested is whether Meta will stop and correct the relevant recommendations, identify and block the advertisements identified by the study, and how responsibility for reviewing the advertisements associated with approximately 2 million reais in revenue can be held to account. More importantly, the question is whether Brazil can bring cross-border funding, and not only domestic political groups, into the same system of electoral accountability.