Brazil presidential election dogged by alleged bias by Meta AI tools
· New Scientist
A deluge of AI-generated content and unfair treatment by social media platforms could prove pivotal in Brazil’s presidential election, according to supporters of the left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
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Lula will face off against right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro on 25 October in the second round of the contest. Lula’s campaign has formally accused Meta – which owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – of favouring Bolsonaro by suspending Lula’s campaign advertising account, suppressing posts and blocking AI-generated content.
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Brazil’s electoral prosecutors have said Meta failed to fully comply with court orders to ensure equal treatment of both candidates, while United Nations human rights experts have said they are concerned by possible unequal treatment of the two campaigns.
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if( window?.adverts?.addToArray ) { window.adverts.addToArray( { "pos": "mid-article-slot" } ); }Images have widely circulated showing Meta AI, a chatbot integrated into WhatsApp, refusing to generate campaign posters for Lula, while instantly producing an image for “Flávio”.
In a statement, Meta said “claims that we are favoring or interfering on behalf of any candidate or political group are false and unfounded”. It said Lula’s account was suspended for 1 hour by mistake and that its systems blocked prompts referring to the names “Lula” and “Bolsonaro”, but not the common first names Luiz or Flávio.
Sign up to The Daily Sign up to newsletterLula’s campaign remains unconvinced. It submitted screenshots to the electoral court showing Meta AI repeatedly assigning Bolsonaro’s electoral number, 22, to generic, fictional politicians and allegedly translating “Flávio futuro presidiário” (“Flávio future prisoner”) as “Flávio future president”.
Determining whether the discrepancies are deliberate is impossible because Meta’s systems are opaque, says David Nemer at the University of Virginia. “But when a technical glitch tends to repeat its outcome, it’s very hard to accept that this is just a technical failure.”
Lula finished behind Bolsonaro in the first round of voting, but polls show the gap is narrowing. The comeback has been partly credited to Lula’s Army, an intensive online campaign in which 8 million WhatsApp channel subscribers receive daily tasks, such as posting photographs on Instagram posing with their fingers forming an L.
This year’s general election is Brazil’s first since large language models (LLMs) became widely popular, and it is awash with AI-generated content. Experts say Latin America’s largest democracy offers a glimpse of what is to come for AI in politics.
Fact-checking organisation Lupa identified 920 pieces of AI-generated or manipulated election content ahead of the first round, primarily on Facebook and Instagram, 60 per cent of it unlabelled. Another investigation found that 26 Meta advertising accounts appeared to sidestep restrictions on foreign-funded political advertising by posting AI-generated videos, including one depicting Bolsonaro and Argentina’s president Javier Milei freeing Brazil from communists.
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Meta’s independent oversight board says the company’s election safeguards have failed.
“It’s very worrying,” says Nemer. “So much of our political campaign dynamics have been transferred to privatised companies that we have no idea how they operate.”
Regulating AI in political campaigns won’t be as simple as it seems, says Heloísa Massaro at InternetLab, a Brazilian digital rights non-profit that studied how eight major AI chatbots respond to questions about Brazil’s election.
Its report found that chatbots sometimes refused genuine questions about candidates, referring users to official electoral websites, but would agree to draft misleading claims questioning the integrity of elections for use in campaigning.
Massaro says clearer safeguards for LLMs are needed, but first their objectives must be defined.
“Are the safeguards working? That’s one question. But working for what, because it depends on what your goals are,” she says. “Is the solution to send people away without providing any kind of information? Is this what we want?”