Digital rights organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil launched a coordinated push to secure rigorous data protection safeguards for Brazil’s elections. The coalition argues that violations of personal data protection are closely related to challenges to the integrity of electoral processes, establishing privacy and data protection safeguards as an essential mechanism for checking the focused diffusion of deceptive or manipulative material and other problematic tactics employed by political figures that are magnified by digital tools like artificial intelligence systems.
The Technical Pipeline of Modern Electoral Disinformation
Modern political manipulation runs on the ability to collect and process large amounts of personal data to create and distribute false or manipulative content. Social media sites feature recommendation engines that leverage personal information to build user profiles, allowing them to deliver tailored advertising, which encompasses overt political campaigning.
This method, designated as political microtargeting, serves to sway electors, to prompt or deter participation at polling stations, or to solicit donations utilizing details that are purposefully wrenched from context, false, or misleading. In an era where generative AI considerably reduces the economic cost and technical difficulty of producing and spreading false or synthetic content to deceive, manipulate, or simulate authenticity, these risks are intensified. Disinformation actors use sophisticated tools—such as those used to create “deepfakes” through generative AI, or “bots” programmed to spread content and seek to manipulate public opinion—to boost the effectiveness of microtargeting. Digital avatars and fabricated personas mimicking electors, social media personalities, presenters, hosts, or neighborhood figureheads can generate seemingly candid video footage alongside simulated voices for artificial political entities, complicating the ability of individuals to recognize whether a public declaration originated from or was shaped by technology.
During 2026, the Independent Scientific Panel on AI Governance established by the UN highlighted that such accelerated growth of AI technologies coupled with data hyper-customization can foster a crisis of “epistemic erosion” across democratic nations.
Enforcing Statutory Safeguards Through Institutional Coordination
The EFF, Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil are pushing for the enforcement of personal data protection laws and public privacy policies in Brazil. The coalition emphasizes coordination among oversight institutions, civil society, and digital platforms.
The joint recommendations center on several technical and regulatory interventions:
- Purpose Limitation and Proportionality: Prohibit the processing of sensitive personal data—including inferred data that reveals or could reveal people’s political preferences, such as philosophical beliefs and the labeling of ideological leanings—for the purpose of targeting political content. Within electoral scenarios, utilizing sensitive personal information is permissible solely when individuals grant prior, unambiguous authorization accompanied by narrowly defined and transparently communicated intents for application and sharing.
- Messaging Restrictions: Ban the inclusion of individuals into chat application channels intended for political solicitation, barring specific scenarios concerning official political organization directories or instances where the individual whose data is collected has supplied prior, educated approval.
- Algorithmic Transparency: Political parties, federations, and coalitions must improve information available to the general public about their personal data processing activities, including information about the profiling they carry out for electoral purposes and the procurement and use of data-based digital technologies for paid promotion, microtargeting, network analysis, and prediction of voters’ reactions or behavior.
- Inter-Agency Oversight: Strengthen cooperation mechanisms between Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) and the Superior Electoral Court to identify and dismantle coordinated strategies that compromise the integrity of the electoral process, such as bot farms, fake personal accounts managed by a single entity, and AI avatars and synthetic characters that simulate real voters.
The 30-Second Verdict on Platform Accountability
The coalition’s blueprint includes a recommendation that platforms disable microtargeting tools for political and electoral content during previously established periods. Furthermore, authorities, technical actors, academics, civil society, and/or social media platforms are encouraged to collaborate in creating an algorithmic impact analysis lab to oversee compliance with these recommendations.
By coupling the enforcement of personal data protection laws with strict technical limitations on data harvesting, the initiative aims to reduce the manipulation of public discourse in digital environments and its impact in electoral contexts.
