Brazil's Election Heats Up: Social Media Under Scrutiny Amidst Allegations of Bias

As Brazil's presidential race enters its final stretch, candidates Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro are not only engaging voters at rallies but also intensely online. The upcoming Sunday runoff is anticipated to be a close contest. However, in the closing days of the campaign, significant questions have arisen regarding the fairness of the digital playing field.

Meta, the parent company of popular platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, is facing accusations before Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE). Critics allege that the social media giant has suppressed content supporting President Lula while promoting material favorable to Senator Bolsonaro.

Meta's platforms are among the most widely used in Brazil, and political advertising expenditure on these sites has surged dramatically. An analysis by the Brazilian news outlet G1 revealed that Meta garnered at least 288 million Brazilian reais ($57 million) in direct campaign spending in 2026, a twofold increase from the 2022 presidential election. This escalation signifies a fundamental shift in electoral strategies in Brazil, where over 76 percent of voters now obtain their news online, according to Andre K Rodarte, a researcher at the Digital Democracy Centre at the University of Southern Denmark.

Rodarte explained that as social media increasingly overshadows traditional advertising, a new wave of politicians is leveraging provocative, viral messaging to connect with the electorate. He cited the success of online influencers such as right-wing personality Nikolas Ferreira and left-wing activist Erika Hilton, both reelected to Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies with record votes.

"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. "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."

Conversely, critics express concern that this pivot to online campaigning leaves political aspirants vulnerable to the biases of Big Tech corporations.

The trend of heavy reliance on online campaigning in Brazil began in 2018 with the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, according to Leticia Cesarino, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Santa Catarina specializing in online far-right politics. Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right leader, is the father of the current presidential frontrunner, Flavio Bolsonaro. During his 2018 campaign, Jair Bolsonaro utilized concise social media posts to promote his platform of stringent crime policies and a return to traditional Christian family values. His supporters famously chanted "Facebook!" and "WhatsApp!" at his 2019 inauguration, highlighting the significance of 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, especially since the kind of logic that underlies the attention economy is structurally beneficial to the kind of alarmistic, simplistic, affect-laden far-right discourse."

During his presidency, Jair Bolsonaro used his social media platforms to cast doubt on the integrity of Brazil's electoral system. Following his defeat in the 2022 election, he continued to propagate unsubstantiated claims of a rigged vote. These claims culminated in the January 8, 2023, storming of Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace by his supporters, shortly after Lula's inauguration.

In the aftermath, the TSE ruled that Jair Bolsonaro had abused his authority to undermine the election and imposed an eight-year ban on his holding public office. He is currently serving a separate 27-year sentence for plotting a coup and is also prohibited from using social media.

The scandal "really shocked a lot of policymakers and political elites to act", stated Vicky Wyatt, a campaign director at Eko, an advocacy coalition for greater tech company accountability. Although Brazil had existing data privacy and protection laws, leaders enacted a series of new regulations following Jair Bolsonaro's presidency.

Current Brazilian law prohibits the use of AI-generated depictions of electoral candidates and mandates disclaimers for any political advertisements employing AI. Content promoting violence, hate speech, or gender-based discrimination is also deemed illegal. Political advertisements on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are restricted to those with official campaign endorsement.

Wyatt noted that Brazil now possesses "some of the strictest laws in the world when it comes to guardrails around the use of AI on tech platforms." However, these regulations have encountered resistance. A Meta spokesperson, in a statement to Al Jazeera, characterized the restrictions as a potential impediment to free speech, stating, "Meta has long warned that Brazil’s strict digital-content rules increase the risk of over-enforcement and threaten free expression."

Evidence suggests that Meta may not be fully complying with these regulations. Daniela da Silva, executive director of CTRL+Z, a non-profit digital rights group, reported that some campaign coordinators have observed a decrease in the organic reach of their posts, necessitating paid promotion. She added that some coordinators reported allocating over 70 percent of their budget for such boosts to Meta platforms.

As of October, CTRL+Z has documented 1,100 reports this year concerning account suspensions or reach restrictions, primarily affecting profiles supporting Lula. Lula's own advertising account was briefly suspended last month. His campaign has cited studies from Eko, CTRL+Z, and other organizations in petitions to the TSE, urging enforcement of rules ensuring equal treatment for political campaigns.

Watchdog groups have also raised concerns about social media platforms' adherence to regulations requiring the removal of misinformation and the restriction of AI-generated content. An experiment by Eko involved submitting 15 election-season ads containing AI-generated content promoting violence and disinformation to Meta; the platform approved 13 of them.

Furthermore, a study by NetLab, a research group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, found that Meta permitted over 1,600 political ads to run on its services, funded by entities outside Brazil. Debora Gomes Salles, NetLab's research head, indicated that malicious actors appeared capable of submitting ads and classifying them as non-political, thereby evading scrutiny on Meta's platforms. These ads generated approximately 2 million Brazilian reais ($400,000) for Meta and, according to Salles, seemed intended to spread disinformation, including false claims about online voting capabilities that could lead to private data collection.

"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 stated. "The damage was already done."

Meta has consistently denied any favoritism towards specific presidential candidates. A company spokesperson told Al Jazeera that technical glitches were responsible for incidents like the temporary removal of Lula's campaign ads and disputed the Eko report's findings on ad moderation, asserting that Meta's system correctly identified "content about social issues, elections or politics" and removed ads violating its policies. The spokesperson also suggested the report's small sample size "does not reflect the scale of this work" out of millions of ads in their Ad Library.

Cesarino, the anthropologist, believes that digital platforms will continue to disseminate problematic content, contributing to the global rise of far-right figures. "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 commented.