Platform reach becomes an election issue as Brazil's presidential runoff nears

21 October 2026

Brazil's presidential runoff is between incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, with voting on Sunday. Lula's campaign petitioned the Superior Electoral Court, the body known as the TSE, asking it to enforce rules requiring equal treatment for political campaigns. Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, says it does not favour any candidate and attributes incidents such as campaign ads going offline to technical errors. Campaign groups report that their organic reach has dropped and that they must boost posts, in some cases spending over 70 per cent of their budgets on Meta. The monitoring group CTRL+Z reported 1,100 cases this year of accounts being taken down or restricted, mostly pro-Lula profiles. The group Eko found that Meta approved 13 of 15 test advertisements that included artificial-intelligence-generated content promoting violence and disinformation, a sample whose relevance Meta disputed. NetLab found Meta allowed over 1,600 political advertisements paid for by companies outside the country. Brazilian election rules ban artificial-intelligence-generated depictions of candidates, require disclaimers on political advertisements using artificial intelligence and restrict platform advertisements to officially backed campaigns. The TSE earlier barred Jair Bolsonaro from public office for eight years.