Meta Faces Brazil Election Storm Over Lula Account Limits

Meta is under mounting pressure in Brazil after employees reportedly acknowledged in internal messages that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's Instagram accounts were negatively affected by restrictions during the country's election campaign, according to Brazilian daily Folha de S Paulo. The same communications reportedly show the platform recommended the profile of Lula's challenger, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel.

The report, published on Friday, landed one day after a judge on Brazil's top electoral court ordered Meta to guarantee equal treatment for both candidates ahead of the October 25 runoff. Lula, the left-wing incumbent, will face right-wing challenger Bolsonaro in the second round after the senator's stronger-than-expected first-round showing earlier this month.

Meta pushed back firmly on any suggestion of political interference. The company told Reuters that the technical issues cited in the report were already public, and that the internal conversations it referenced related only to the severity of those problems, not to favoring a candidate. "Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false," Meta said in a statement, as reported by Reuters and Bloomberg.

In other words, Meta's position is that this was a glitch story, not a manipulation story. The company has not disputed that some accounts were affected, only the interpretation that it acted with political intent.

The legal fight escalated quickly. Lula filed a complaint accusing Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — of using biased algorithms and AI restrictions to favor Bolsonaro. Justice Marco Aurelio Bellizze of Brazil's top electoral court then ruled that Meta cannot reduce the distribution of political content, restrict searches or remove posts in a way that creates an imbalance between the two candidates. The ruling also requires Meta's artificial intelligence tools to apply identical criteria to both candidacies.