World
BRASIL Meta denied interfering in Brazil’s election and said the issues were technical
The company answered accusations from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign and said it does not favor any candidate. It also detailed an ad-account suspension, ad system failures and a problem involving its AI assistant.
Meta said on Friday, in a statement reported by O Globo, that it is not interfering in Brazil’s election and that the episodes raised by the campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were the result of technical failures or operational mistakes, not political bias.
The response came after Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze of the Superior Electoral Court ordered the company, until the end of the runoff, not to interfere in the distribution of political and electoral content related to either Lula or Flávio Bolsonaro, under penalty of a daily fine of R$ 500,000, according to O Globo.
Meta said Lula’s campaign ad account was mistakenly disabled on September 23 for a little over an hour during an anti-fraud review. The company said Lula’s official Facebook campaign page and Instagram account were never blocked. It linked the episode to Brazil’s digital-content rules, which it argues increase the risk of over-enforcement.
Meta also said a technical incident on October 7 affected systems that count Reels views and replays for about five hours. According to the company, content continued to be distributed normally and the issue affected creators in more than 100 countries. Meta added that Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign reported the same problem that day.
Regarding October 9, Meta said it identified a global failure in Ads Manager caused by a code update that temporarily prevented advertisers from creating ads from posts already published on Instagram. According to Folha de S.Paulo, that problem left Lula’s official profile unable for nearly 24 hours to boost feed posts, although it could still promote new content and keep older campaigns running. The newspaper also reported that Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign was not affected by that failure.
On Meta AI, the assistant integrated into WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, the company said the October 14 episode stemmed from a gap in its safeguards rather than political bias. According to O Globo, Meta said it had blocked prompts in Brazil that explicitly named the candidates, but its systems did not always detect combinations of a common first name and an electoral number. Folha de S.Paulo added that, according to Meta, the same flaw could also affect prompts linked to Lula when users combined Luiz with his ballot number.
Meta said, according to O Globo, that none of the incidents reflected manipulation of content distribution or an attempt to influence the election. Folha de S.Paulo, however, reported that internal messages obtained by the newspaper showed company employees had acknowledged restrictions that hurt Lula-linked accounts and algorithmic recommendations involving Flávio Bolsonaro’s profile and channel, a practice barred by Brazil’s electoral authorities.
According to Folha de S.Paulo, Meta’s public statement did not address two other points raised by the paper: recommendations for Flávio Bolsonaro’s profile in Instagram search results and suggestions for the WhatsApp channel Tropa do Flávio when users searched for Exército do Lula.
Sources
About this piece. Written by El Notero with AI assistance, from reporting published by the outlet cited above. El Notero did no original reporting on this story.
