Facebook Blocks Lula’s Campaign Ads Just Days Before Brazil Election

Meta briefly disabled ads on the Facebook page of Brazil’s leftwing president on Friday – just days before he faces a far-right challenger in national elections. 

The campaign of incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has filed an appeal with the social media giant and is awaiting an explanation for the incident, state-run Agência Brasil reported.

Lula, 80, is running for a fourth and final term against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. 

The controversy over the Facebook ads comes after Amnesty International accused Meta of failing to stop the spread of election-related misinformation on the platform. 

The rights group ran an experiment in September where it submitted 14 ads to Facebook that contained disinformation and “were designed to reflect… tactics that are often used by politicians and candidates to support authoritarian practices.” 

Amnesty’s test ads contained incorrect information on when and where to vote and which candidates were running, Amnesty said, as well as false allegations that “certain candidates were rigging the election”.

Facebook approved eight of the ads containing disinformation. Of the ads it rejected, none were flagged for disinformation. One of the ads that passed said: “We need a military revolution, do not vote in the elections, and the military will take back power if less than 50% votes!”

Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, said Meta’s failure to catch the ads was “deeply alarming” and “shows that Meta is not doing enough to prevent its platform from being a vector of disinformation, while continuing to profit from the content and advertising systems that enable its spread.” 

Shortly after beating the older Bolsonaro in 2022, Lula thwarted a coup attempt by his defeated rival. Ahead of this year’s poll on 4 October, Lula has warned of foreign interference in the election by the US, where president Donald Trump support’s Bolsonaro candidacy. 

Bolsonaro is a staunch supporter of Israel and has promised to align Brazil more closely with the apartheid state, including by moving its embassy to Jerusalem. 

Lula, a prominent Israel critic and former union leader, has said Trump is trying to influence the election with economic pressure, after the US imposed two new rounds of tariffs in July.