Protesters target Meta office in Brazil over alleged political bias

A group protested against tech giant Meta in front of the company’s office in São Paulo on Monday over its alleged interference in Brazil’s elections.

Last week on Friday, Meta denied accusations that it acted with political bias during Brazil’s presidential campaign, less than a day after the country’s electoral court ruled the platform must give equal treatment to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro ahead of their Oct. 25 runoff.

The lawsuit was triggered by Lula’s campaign, which claimed that the company owning Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp was using biased algorithms and AI restrictions to favor Bolsonaro. The suit in Brazil echoes related European cases in Romania and Germany, where courts previously intervened to correct platform imbalances.

Meta said in response that a series of recent platform issues stemmed from unrelated global technical glitches, strict anti-fraud measures, and regulatory compliance rather than targeted suppression. It insisted its systems do not distribute content based on political ideology and emphasized that rules are applied equally.

The company said it had two global technical disruptions earlier in October: one froze view counts on Instagram Reels across more than 100 countries while content distribution remained normal, and another briefly disrupted ad creation from existing Instagram posts in one of its tools for one day.

Meta did not, however, address why Bolsonaro’s Instagram and WhatsApp channels received algorithmic recommendations, a practice ruled illegal by Brazil’s electoral court.

Adding to Meta’s challenges in Brazil, a study released this week by NetLab, a research group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro revealed that the platform allowed at least 1,613 irregular political ads — totaling 171 million views and generating roughly 2 million reais ($400,000) in revenue between July and September — funded primarily from the United States.

“In Brazil, it is prohibited for any entity other than a political party, a candidate, or a coalition to purchase electoral advertisements. No company should be able to buy ads on Meta, whether from within Brazil or abroad, to promote an electoral campaign," said communication professor Marie Santini, who was involved in the study. “It is not the first time that Meta is negligent with the electoral law, not the first country. It is a systematic behavior of the company.”