“People were asking Meta's AI on WhatsApp to generate an image of Lula with his party number, and the response would be, 'I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to generate that.' Then they'd say, generate me one of the rival candidate with his number, and it would generate it. Meta called this a technical inconvenience and said a filter was applied because Lula's name was so short, only four letters.”
Tech Won't Save Us · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Martins, a Brazilian tech journalist, describes how restrictions on Lula's campaign became visible to ordinary users through Meta's AI image feature in WhatsApp during Brazil's election. A later civil society report said the restrictions persisted after Meta promised to look into it.
Transcript
…this was before the first round. After the second round, we saw more evidence piling of, again, of content moderation decisions that were not only hurting big figures, but civilians, like journalists, activists, academics, university groups, unions. So there's an organization in Brazil called. This
is after the first round and before the second round.
Exactly, in those three weeks in between. There's an organization in Brazil called Control-Z, a recent organization that is pushing back against big tech's power. And they accounted for at least 1,200 reports of censored accounts, you know, technical restrictions on accounts like you're unable to like or repost. 1,200 content moderation decisions that affected these accounts. On, I think, a few days before the second round, we had this massive scoop by Folliad São Paulo, a newspaper in Brazil, based on internal messages from Meta Meddle confirming there was a technical restriction on Lula's account that was hurting his engagement and reach. You know, people identified they couldn't understand why they sent it out to engineers in California. These guys also couldn't explain why. They took a long time. It seemed from the messages that Meta didn't prioritize this. I think this shows, well, you know better than me, Paris, but maybe five, like eight years ago, this would have been a war room situation, right? They would have stopped everything they were doing to figure out what happened. Why is this? Like maybe it is a technical glitch, but why is there a technical glitch? So…
Exactly. You know, figure out the degree to which things were occurring during the campaign, you know, the degree to which that did actually hurt Lula's campaign and favor Flavio. And also, you know, what can be done to ensure that this doesn't happen again? Because, you know, obviously a step has…
No, I don't think we had any reports of WhatsApp. We did have like lots of reports of WhatsApp accounts being like disabled by Meta, but this has been happening, I guess, not only in Brazil for a long time already because they're thinking it's spam. So like I have many journalists, friends whose…
Exactly. I think that makes perfect sense. And when I hear you say that, it brings to mind how, and I'm not sure what the rules are exactly in Brazil, but in many countries, how, you know, during an election campaign, there are typically rules on traditional media organizations around how they…
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