Lula camp accuses Meta of interfering in Brazil election; Brazil's electoral court gives 48 hours for explanation

According to The Hindu, the campaign team of Brazilian President Lula publicly accused on October 11 the tech giant Meta of interfering in Brazil's election, alleging that its platforms repeatedly restricted the promotion and reach of content from Lula's accounts around the first round of voting. Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) had issued an order to Meta the previous day, requiring it to explain, within 48 hours, each of the related measures taken and the anomalous indicators.

In a statement, the campaign team said Meta "prevented President Lula's personal page from promoting posts in the Instagram feed," while an official account post "experienced an interruption in view counts, affecting its reach." The statement also alleged that, before the October 4 first-round vote, the accounts of Lula and other left-wing leaders "suddenly disappeared from Instagram's search function." The campaign team therefore considered that "this series of technical issues strongly suggests that Meta's actions constituted an attempt to interfere in Brazil's electoral process in order to benefit the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro."

The TSE's directive required Meta to "account, on a per-account basis, for all measures taken with respect to the 'Lula official account'," and to "explain the anomalies in video metrics." Lula's campaign team has filed a formal complaint with the electoral court over the matter.

The allegations emerged at a critical juncture in Brazilian politics. In the October 4 first-round vote, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, finished first, with Lula in second place, setting up a runoff between the two on October 25. Lula is seeking a fourth non-consecutive term. After the first round, the president, who does not use a mobile phone, launched an intensive social media push, posting videos aimed directly at his online supporters.

Meta's Brazil office denied all the allegations. A Meta email statement obtained by Agence France-Presse described the claims as "baseless" and said that "many of the technical issues mentioned do not affect only Brazil or specific accounts." Meta stated: "We comply with electoral regulations and are committed to providing a level playing field in the use of our platforms."

The controversy surrounding the incident has once again exposed the asymmetric structure facing electoral processes in the Global South: Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have hundreds of millions of users in Brazil, constituting critical infrastructure for campaign publicity and political mobilization, while the algorithms and enforcement rules that determine whether content can be promoted and how far it can reach are set unilaterally in Silicon Valley, neither disclosed nor easily subject to independent audit. The 48-hour directive issued by the TSE has enabled Brazil's electoral regulator to put questions to Meta, but whether those inquiries can translate into effective constraints on the platform's conduct will depend on the final conclusions of the TSE's investigation.