Groups file evidence with Brazil court alleging Meta favors Bolsonaro
Sleeping Giants Brasil and CTRL+Z Submit New Electoral Court Evidence Against Meta
On Monday, activist groups Sleeping Giants Brasil and CTRL+Z submitted fresh evidence to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court alleging that Meta platforms continued to favor Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign over President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign, in direct violation of an existing judicial order.
The Tech TL;DR:
- Activist groups filed technical test logs with the Superior Electoral Court on Monday, showing persistent algorithmic ranking discrepancies across Meta’s search, GIF, and hashtag recommendation systems.
- The Superior Electoral Court previously ordered Meta to enforce equal treatment for both campaigns, backed by a daily fine of R$500,000 (about $99,000) that Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze warned could double to R$1 million.
Algorithmic Search Imbalances and GIF Ranking Discrepancies on WhatsApp and Instagram
According to documentation filed with Superior Electoral Court Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze, automated recommendation pipelines on WhatsApp and Instagram persistently elevated content for Liberal Party candidate Flávio Bolsonaro while associating Workers’ Party candidate Lula with derogatory imagery. As panamericandispatch.org reported, a journalist with Folha de S.Paulo, Mônica Bergamo, broke the initial story regarding the petition asking Justice Bellizze to order irregularities fixed within 24 hours.
The newly submitted court records detail specific test queries executed across multiple user accounts. When testers searched for the term “brasil” via WhatsApp’s animated GIF picker, the top-ranking result displayed Flávio Bolsonaro alongside his ticket number and running mate across three separate test accounts. Identical keyword queries on Instagram surfaced the senator’s images within the top result slots, whereas President Lula was represented solely by text without an accompanying photograph.
Conversely, searches for negative terms exposed sharp disparities in content moderation and organic indexing. A WhatsApp GIF search for “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of Lula depicted in prison-style striped clothing alongside a message declaring support for the Workers’ Party to be a mental illness. Meanwhile, an Instagram hashtag query for “lula” placed “#lulaladrão” (Lula thief) as the primary autocomplete suggestion, whereas a parallel search for “bolsonaro” relegated the critical hashtag “#bolsonaronuncamais” (Bolsonaro never again) to the bottom of the suggestion list.
Meta AI Random Number Generation Tests Highlighted in Court Petition
Beyond traditional recommendation algorithms, the petitioners highlighted anomalous behavior within Meta AI, the large language model integrated directly into WhatsApp. Independent testers prompted the assistant to pick an arbitrary integer between 1 and 25 without providing any political context or election-related prompts. Across multiple isolated test executions, the model returned the exact ballot numbers associated with the two competing political camps—yielding 13 for Lula’s Workers’ Party and 22 for Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party.
3 days after Meta was ordered to stop manipulating algorithms to favor Flavio Bolsonaro in the presidential election, two orgs have submitted evidence to Brazil's Superior Electoral Court that the corporation is still violating national election laws. https://t.co/GzJIA8gSjL
While the petition stops short of proving explicit electoral preference within the model's weight distribution or inference parameters, the organizations argue that the coincidence shows an urgent need for algorithmic transparency. The filing demands that Meta disclose the precise heuristic parameters and ranking criteria governing search sorting, hashtag prioritization, and large language model inference responses.
Escalating Court Sanctions and Public Protests at São Paulo Headquarters
The legal pressure compounds as the Superior Electoral Court adopts a hardened compliance posture. Justice Bellizze issued a fresh 24-hour ultimatum on Sunday demanding verifiable proof of compliance with previous non-discrimination directives, warning that the initial R$500,000 daily penalty could be escalated to R$1 million (about $198,000) for continued non-compliance. The full court formally upheld these measures on Friday, reinforcing the legal mandate requiring digital platforms to enforce strict neutrality.
Meta employees say Instagram restrictions affected Brazil President Lula’s accounts during the election. Internal messages also said the platform recommended rival Flavio Bolsonaro’s profile and WhatsApp channel. Meta denies political interference.🔗 https://t.co/dbtOGOFqmT pic.twitter.com/0wDCg7lht5
Sleeping Giants Brasil and CTRL+Z filed a petition with the Superior Electoral Court addressed to Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze, asking the court to order Meta to fix alleged irregularities and explain how its algorithms and artificial intelligence work.
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