The Brazilian left’s quest to ‘tame’ Meta: A narrative of denouncement and resistance

This story by Samanta Azpurua originally appeared on Global Voices  on November 2, 2026.

Over the years, Meta’s content moderation policies and governance practices have faced intense scrutiny and legal challenges over alleged political bias and a lack of transparency.

Since 2018, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement (7amleh), a human rights organization advocating for Palestinian digital rights, has documented how Facebook’s (now Meta) moderation practices disproportionately affect Palestinian content. In 2020, 7amleh launched a campaign challenging Facebook’s proposed hate speech policy, which considered “Zionist” a potential proxy for “Jew” or “Jewish.” More recently, in 2024, the organization collected 20 first-hand testimonies from Palestinian influencers, journalists, and media outlets documenting their experiences of Meta’s discriminatory content moderation practices. In 2023, Human Rights Watch also reported “systemic online censorship” against voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights,

In 2022, Tom Vandendriessche, a Belgian politician and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) representing the far-right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party, partially prevailed in a legal case against Meta concerning a shadow ban imposed on his account in 2021 after the company removed several posts alleging a breach of its Terms of Service (ToS) and Facebook Community Guidelines (FCG). A Belgian court ordered the company to compensate the politician for financial and reputational damages, finding that its actions had significantly restricted his ability to engage in political discourse online and that Meta had failed to provide adequate transparency or effective avenues for redress.

In 2026, Meta has faced significant criticism in Brazil and internationally from internet rights watchdogs over political bias, algorithmic interference, and the selective suppression of content perceived as favoring far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro during the October 2026 Brazilian presidential election.

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Narrative: Meta, take your hands off our election!

Using the slogan Meta não se meta (roughly, “Meta, stay out of it”), which plays on the Portuguese word meta, derived from the verb meter (“to get involved” or “to interfere”), internet rights defenders and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s followers and allies sought not only to expose alleged Meta’s shadow-banning practices during Brazil’s 2026 presidential election but also to mobilize Brazilians to demand a fairer digital space collectively. 

Sub-narrative: We demand digital sovereignty, and we will hold Meta accountable

In October 2026, during the Brazilian presidential runoff election campaign, a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations, social movements, and digital rights advocacy groups, including CTRL+Z, Código Não Binário, ARTIGO 19 (Article 19 Brasil), Sleeping Giants Brasil, and others, launched the webpage naosemeta.com.br as part of their initiative to denounce electoral interference and algorithmic bias. The site offered three ways for people to hold Meta accountable online: email Meta; message Meta’s General Director in Brazil on LinkedIn; and comment on Meta Ceo Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Instagram post. It also shared a space for those wishing to join and sign a petition to the Superior Electoral Court and an extrajudicial notification, a formal written communication sent on October 19 to put Meta on notice and demand that it recognize the technical flaws in its advertising, moderation, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and the distribution and availability of user-generated content and campaign materials in Brazil — which these organizations claim disadvantaged, in particular, candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The online strategy to hold Meta accountable was accompanied by a protest in front of Meta’s offices on October 19, where participants called for respect for Brazil’s digital sovereignty, with the Homeless Workers Movement’s Technology Center among the loudest voices.

For those reclaiming digital sovereignty, the company’s actions stem from the relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil’s ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, father of Flávio Bolsonaro, and the influence the current U.S. administration has over big-tech owners — they consider Meta to be facilitating foreign interference.

Sub-narrative: Together, we can “tame” the algorithm

An extra layer supported the narrative “Meta, take your hands off our election!” After the first round of the election gave candidate Flávio Bolsonaro a small lead in early October, left-wing Congressman André Janones relaunched his WhatsApp channel, “Lula’s Army,” an initiative to mobilize voters online and offline and give visibility to Lula da Silva’s messaging and proposals, and that quickly gained millions of followers.

In addition to reclaiming Brazilian symbols from the far-right, including inviting followers to wear the country’s yellow soccer team T-shirt, the WhatsApp channel coordinated social media interactions to boost Lula da Silva’s visibility. By giving his “troops” instructions on when and how to engage with the content Lula da Silva’s campaign produced, Janones positioned an implicit narrative that argued it was possible to “tame” the algorithm, regain ownership of the Brazilian digital media ecosystem, and ultimately win the election, recapturing the campaign spirits.

After Lula da Silva’s unprecedented second-round comeback on October 25, this narrative evolved to “dobramos a Meta,” which translates to “we doubled Meta,” hinting at the “dobrar a meta” (doubled the target) popular meme that originated from a statement made by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in July 2015, during a speech on the National Program for Access to Technical Education and Employment (PRONATEC)— all to say “we were able to overcome Meta’s content moderation policies and governance.”

The context surrounding the narrative

Brazil ranks as the world’s second-largest country by WhatsApp users (148 million) and the third-largest addressable Instagram audience (147 million). The country is considered a pioneer in internet governance and digital regulation, with a strong tradition of open, multistakeholder approaches to protecting digital rights, especially thanks to the country's foundational internet law, Federal Law No. 12.965/2014, known as the Marco Civil da Internet.

For more than 10 years, Brazil’s Marco Civil da Internet protected digital platforms from civil liability for third-party content, except when they failed to comply with a specific court order requiring its removal, safeguarding freedom of expression while preventing platforms from being inundated with takedown requests. This changed in June 2025, when the country’s Supreme Court, recognizing shifts in digital media ecosystems, ruled that Federal Law No. 12.965/2014 was partially unconstitutional because it no longer sufficiently protected fundamental rights and democracy. The ruling made digital platforms liable for third parties’ content in Brazil, a decision experts argue is impossible to fulfill until digital platforms offer real transparency into their content moderation policies and governance practices. 

In October 2026, Sleeping Giant Brasil shared a report on what they consider evidence of Meta’s “algorithmic favoritism” toward the Bolsonaros’ political allies, focusing on the case of Nikolas Ferreira, a right-wing politician affiliated with the Liberal Party (PL) — currently serving as a Member of the Chamber of Deputies, elected for a four-year term in 2022.

On October 14, the Brazilian independent news site Nucleo shared an investigation showing how Meta’s AI favored creating images of Flávio Bolsonaro on WhatsApp. According to the outlet, Meta acknowledged the failure via email and said it would take the necessary measures to prevent it from happening again.

On October 15, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) ruled that Meta must refrain from interfering with the distribution of political and electoral content posted by either Lula da Silva or Flávio Bolsonaro until the conclusion of the election’s second round, stating that failure to comply with the ruling would result in a daily fine of BRL 500,000 (USD 91,942). The decision came after Lula da Silva’s reelection campaign team denounced to the TSE that Meta repeatedly restricted the reach of publications linked to the government candidate and his supporters

On October 16, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that restrictions during the country's election hindered the Instagram accounts of Lula da Silva.

Meta acknowledged technical issues on its platforms on October 16, but said they were not the result of political bias. In an official statement, the company said the “ad account for Lula’s campaign was deactivated by mistake for just over an hour, and not for political reasons,” and that several of the reported problems were part of a “global” failure. 

In his celebration speech, Lula da Silva promised to prioritize new regulations that ensure big digital media platforms are held accountable. He stated that during the recent election, he and his allies had to “overcome outside interference coming in through digital platforms,” and argued Brazil “cannot have monstrous companies earning billions, paying no taxes, and trying to steer” the country’s elections.

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Social media and disinformation have played a central role in past elections in Brazil, as research shared by Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review, a scholarly publication, argues that in the 2022 election, “susceptibility to electoral misinformation is affected by factors such as political ideology, trust in the electoral process and democratic institutions, and information consumption, with those who participate in political groups in messaging apps being more likely to believe in electoral misinformation.”

As in 2022 but without the coup plot, the Bolsonaro family alleges electoral fraud. In a first letter shared after fleeing the country amid open investigations linking him to money laundering, Flávio Bolsonaro first declared himself “the elected president,” then deleted it and replaced it with a second version calling himself the rightful “leader” of Brazil. Bolsonaro argues in the text that he had to leave the country to prevent political persecution. 

Although Flávio Bolsonaro insisted he would seek to annul the presidential election, his party later distanced itself from that position in a statement and chose to accept the official results, while still reporting irregularities during the electoral process.

[Wc/GS]

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