MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Lula’s campaign takes alleged Meta favouritism towards Bolsonaro to the UN and federal police

The incidents reported include reduced reach for Lula’s Instagram profiles, WhatsApp searches for the “Lula’s Army” channel suggesting the “Flávio’s Troop” channel instead

The coalition backing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election on Saturday reported to the UN alleged unequal treatment by Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, in favour of his rival, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, and asked the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Federal Police to investigate possible illegal funding of his campaign. Meta attributes the incidents to technical errors.

Lula’s campaign submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression a technical report on what it describes as “serious events that interfered with equal conditions between the candidates”. It asks Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet and the Federal Police to determine whether Bolsonaro obtained economic advantages in content distribution from Meta’s systems, which would amount to an electoral crime. It also requests that the candidate, his campaign treasurer and Meta executives in Brazil give statements, that the company’s internal communications be preserved and that judicial cooperation be sought from the United States to obtain records from the parent company.

The incidents reported include reduced reach for Lula’s Instagram profiles, WhatsApp searches for the “Lula’s Army” channel suggesting the “Flávio’s Troop” channel instead, and Meta’s artificial intelligence tool refusing to generate images supporting Lula while doing so for his rival. According to the newspaper El País, Meta employees acknowledged in internal messages that the reach of Lula’s accounts had been restricted.

“The integrity of an election does not depend exclusively on the security of the ballot boxes,” the campaign says in its filing, but also on voters being able to form their views “without undue manipulation” or “imbalance in the digital contest”. There was no response on record from Bolsonaro’s campaign.

Polls show a statistical tie, with Bolsonaro slightly ahead, a week before the October 25 runoff. The two candidates face each other on Sunday in their first televised debate, on the Band network.