Just over a week before Brazil’s presidential runoff election, incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign filed a formal complaint with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) on Wednesday, accusing Meta of actively suppressing its digital advertising while favoring opponent Flávio Bolsonaro. Meta denies any targeted political interference.
Campaign Ad Bans and Unverified Reach Discrepancies
The electoral alliance supporting Lula reported severe disruptions to its digital outreach across Meta’s platforms. According to the campaign’s filing, the official Instagram profile for Lula was blocked from running paid advertisements from October 9 until the morning of October 10. This followed an earlier total deactivation of the campaign’s primary ad account on September 23.
U.S. tech giant Meta has banned Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's campaign ads, in a move many are calling brazen election interference. Just day 10s before a high-stakes presidential election in Brazil, Meta banned campaign ads from the incumbent president as he… pic.twitter.com/Virv3cC36u
Beyond blocked ad spend, the team flagged abnormal fluctuations in view counts on individual campaign videos. The TSE responded to these complaints on October 10 by issuing an order requiring Meta to deliver a detailed technical report within 48 hours regarding any platform-wide reach restrictions or moderation protocols.
Meta pushed back against the allegations of political bias. The tech giant attributed the view count irregularities to a global technical glitch that struck on October 7. The incident impacted the display of video metrics across more than 100 countries, though Meta insisted the glitch affected only the visible counter dashboards rather than the underlying distribution of the content. That technical explanation, however, left the subsequent ad account suspensions largely unexplained in the eyes of the campaign.
WhatsApp AI Generator Discrepancies
The dispute expanded beyond traditional ad placements into generative artificial intelligence features embedded within messaging infrastructure. Investigations by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo revealed that Meta AI inside WhatsApp consistently refused requests to generate campaign posters for Lula when queries originated from Brazilian phone numbers. Yet, identical prompts submitted via foreign phone numbers successfully produced the requested Lula graphics.
Parallel tests conducted by the newspaper Veja confirmed the asymmetrical output behavior.
Meta pointed to existing platform guardrails designed to limit AI-generated candidate imagery during the Brazilian election cycle.
Outstanding Demands and Broadcast Criticism
The Lula alliance is demanding an immediate lifting of all active account restrictions alongside compensation for lost digital reach. The coalition also requested a formal investigation into unusually high view counts registered on videos published by Bolsonaro supporter Nikolas Ferreira.
As the TSE weighs these new demands, independent criticism has also targeted traditional broadcast media coverage of the election. Following a major demonstration for Lula in São Paulo on October 11, multiple journalists and cultural figures accused Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest private television network, of minimizing the physical turnout through tightly cropped camera angles. Similar critiques targeted the sparse coverage offered by the 24-hour news channel GloboNews.
Judicial authorities have not yet issued a ruling on the campaign’s latest filings against Meta.
