Internal communications among Meta staff indicated that the Instagram presence of Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had been affected by platform restrictions applied during the nation's election period, according to media reports. Those internal communications, as detailed by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, further noted that the platform had been directing users toward the profile of Lula's electoral rival Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, along with his WhatsApp channel.
Documentation of those exchanges came through Folha, the newspaper headquartered in São Paulo, which had obtained and reviewed the messages directly.
In a statement to a news outlet, Meta maintained that the technical problems referenced in the report had already been disclosed publicly, and that internal discussions around those problems addressed their severity rather than any form of political influence — a characterisation the company disputed, asserting that any portrayal of it as favouring a particular side is without basis.
With a presidential runoff set for October 25, Lula and Bolsonaro were to compete for the country's highest office after the former senator's first-round vote share came in ahead of what most polls had anticipated.
Before the story came to public attention, a court in Brazil had already issued an order requiring Meta to treat both candidates on equal footing ahead of the runoff election. The decision from a judge sitting on Brazil's top electoral tribunal came after Lula lodged a formal complaint alleging that the technology company — the parent entity behind Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp — had deployed algorithmic systems and artificial-intelligence restrictions in ways that gave an advantage to opposition candidate Bolsonaro in the lead-up to the vote.
A ruling handed down by Justice Marco Aurelio Bellizze bars Meta from throttling the reach of political content, blocking search results, or taking down posts in ways that would result in unequal treatment of Lula and Bolsonaro on the platform. The decision additionally compels the firm to guarantee that its AI-powered screening tool applies the same evaluation standards to both candidates.
Under the terms set out in his ruling, Bellizze placed a daily penalty of 500,000 reais — equivalent to roughly $98,700 — on Meta for each day the company falls short of compliance.
The party behind Lula's candidacy told reporters that a number of his posts were stripped of sharing functionality and received lower distribution than usual. Absent from the platform were tools for reacting to content, passing it along to others, listening via audio, or adjusting playback pace.
