NetLab researchers found candidate channels appearing in YouTube Shorts recommendations during Brazil’s election campaign. They compared suggestions shown to three browsing personas with the electoral court’s channel register. The audit identified recommendations from registered candidate channels and additional channels with missing or mismatched declarations. NetLab characterizes the findings as noncompliance with the rule excluding candidate content from organic recommendations.
YouTube Shorts recommended videos from candidate channels during Brazil’s election campaign, according to an audit by NetLab, a laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The researchers compared suggested channels with the social-media addresses candidates had declared to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, known as the TSE. They found 44 recommendations from 26 candidate channels whose addresses appeared in that register.[1], [2]
Observation ran from September 26 to October 4. One browsing persona favored Flávio Bolsonaro, another favored Lula and a control persona consumed no political content. Both presidential candidates’ channels appeared among the findings. The researchers also identified seven official channels with an address different from the one declared to the court, or used by candidates who had not declared a YouTube channel. These were additional cases outside the set of registered addresses.[1]
TSE Resolution 23.732/2024 requires candidates to declare their campaign pages, channels and profiles and requires recommendation systems to exclude those channels and their content from organic suggestions. NetLab describes the observed recommendations as noncompliance with that rule. Its analysis covered both declared channels and undeclared channels used for campaigning. The laboratory says its funders did not participate in the research. Access to the underlying database requires an identified request explaining the purpose and intended use.[1]
