In October 2026, as Brazil's presidential runoff was being contested, an alliance of civil society organizations, social movements and digital rights groups launched a campaign against Meta, which they accuse of interfering in the elections. The company denies any political motive and cites technical failures, according to the analysis published by Global Voices.
A campaign with its own slogan
Under the slogan "Meta, não se meta", a play on the verb "meter" (to get involved or interfere), supporters of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and internet rights advocates denounced alleged covert blocking practices. Among the backers are CTRL+Z, Código Não Binário, ARTIGO 19, Sleeping Giants Brasil and other collectives.
The website naosemeta.com.br offered three ways to pressure the company: an email to Meta, a LinkedIn message to the firm's chief executive in Brazil, and a comment on Mark Zuckerberg's most recent Instagram post. It also collected signatures for a petition to the Superior Electoral Court. On 19 October an extrajudicial notice was sent asking Meta to admit technical failures in its advertising, moderation and artificial intelligence systems that, in the organizations' view, harmed candidate Lula above all.
That day there was also a demonstration outside Meta's headquarters in São Paulo. The Technology Unit of the Homeless Workers' Movement stood out among the voices and demanded digital sovereignty. Those who call for it link the company's behavior to the relationship between Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, father of Flávio Bolsonaro, and argue that Meta favors foreign interference.
Court decision and the company's response
On 14 October, the independent outlet Nucleo reported that Meta's AI tended to generate images of Flávio Bolsonaro more easily on WhatsApp. According to that outlet, the company acknowledged the error by email and said it would act to prevent it from happening again. That same month, Sleeping Giants Brasil released a report on what it describes as "algorithmic favoritism" toward Bolsonaro allies, with federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira as the central case.
On 15 October, the Superior Electoral Court ruled that Meta must not interfere with the circulation of political and electoral posts by Lula or Flávio Bolsonaro until the end of the runoff. Any breach would carry a penalty of 500,000 reais (91,942 dollars) per day. The ruling followed a complaint from Lula's campaign team, which alleged repeated restrictions on the reach of its content.
The following day, Folha de S.Paulo reported that Meta employees admitted in internal communications that the limits applied during the electoral process affected Lula's Instagram profiles. On 16 October Meta acknowledged technical failures but denied political bias. It explained in a statement that the Lula campaign's ad account had been mistakenly suspended for a little over an hour, and that several of the reported problems stemmed from a "global" fault.
"Lula's Army" and the change of slogan
After the first round left Flávio Bolsonaro with a slight lead in early October, left-wing deputy André Janones reactivated his WhatsApp channel "Lula's Army", designed to mobilize voters online and offline. According to Global Voices, the channel quickly gained millions of followers, reclaimed far-right symbols such as the yellow national team jersey, and coordinated interactions to give Lula visibility. The analysis interprets Janones as implicitly suggesting that it was possible to "tame" the algorithm.
After Lula's unprecedented comeback in the runoff, on 25 October, the message became "dobramos a Meta", an allusion to the meme "dobrar a meta", born from a statement by Dilma Rousseff in July 2015. It now amounts to having overcome the company's moderation policies and governance.
In his victory speech, Lula pledged to prioritize new rules that would make it possible to hold large platforms accountable.
Legal framework and the Bolsonaros' reaction
According to the text, Brazil ranks second in the world by WhatsApp users, with 148 million, and third by Instagram advertising audience, with 147 million. For more than a decade, Law 12,965/2014, the Marco Civil da Internet, exempted platforms from civil liability for third-party content, unless they disobeyed a specific court order. In June 2025, the Supreme Court declared it partially unconstitutional and held platforms responsible for such content; experts cited consider compliance impossible without real transparency on moderation.
Flávio Bolsonaro, who left the country amid investigations linking him to money laundering, proclaimed himself "president-elect" in a first letter and then replaced it with another in which he presents himself as Brazil's legitimate "leader". Although he insisted he would try to annul the elections, his party distanced itself in a statement and accepted the official results, while continuing to denounce irregularities.
Sources
- Global Voices en Español (CC BY 3.0)
