Meta rejects Brazil election interference claims and cites technical failures
Meta denied favouring a candidate in Brazil’s election and attributed campaign advertising and image-generation problems to technical failures. Its Friday response followed a court order requiring equal treatment of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro. The company described mistakes affecting advertising accounts and Reels counters, while the judge said evidence of deliberate manipulation remained insufficient.
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Meta answers Lula campaign’s complaints
Meta, the owner of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, denied interfering in Brazil’s election or favouring any candidate on 16 October. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign had complained about unequal treatment compared with Flávio Bolsonaro. The company said its rules applied equally and that its systems did not classify or distribute content by political ideology. Its Friday statement followed an order from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court requiring equal treatment of the campaigns. Meta presented technical explanations for incidents involving advertising, video counters and generated images.[1], [2]
The company attributes account and image problems to errors
Meta said Lula’s advertising account was mistakenly disabled for just over an hour on 23 September after an advert was flagged during an anti-fraud review. His official Instagram and Facebook profiles were not blocked, it said. The company also attributed differing Meta AI image responses to safeguards that missed some combinations of common first names and electoral numbers. It said the gap identified on 14 October also affected requests using Lula’s first name, Luiz, and that it corrected the problem that day. These explanations were the company’s account of the failures.[1]
Another error on 9 October prevented thousands of advertisers internationally from creating adverts from existing Instagram posts, Meta said. It attributed that incident to a code update and said it was fixed early the next day. Bellizze also required paid promotion that system failures had prevented from running to be made up by 21 October.[1], [2]
The court requires human review of advertising restrictions
Judge Marco Aurélio Bellizze’s 15 October order requires equal treatment through the 25 October runoff, with a daily fine of 500,000 reais for non-compliance. Advertising restrictions require human review, and automatic measures must be reviewed within two hours and reported to the court. Bellizze said there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Meta had deliberately manipulated distribution to favour or harm a candidate. The company separately said a global error on 7 October affected Reels view counts in more than 100 countries for about five hours, without changing video distribution.[1]
