Meta AI Faces Brazil Court Order Over Lula Image Refusal

Brazil's top electoral court has ordered Meta Platforms not to interfere with the distribution of political content ahead of Sunday's presidential runoff, after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's campaign accused the company of "repeatedly and systematically" failing to deliver his content and said Meta AI refused image prompts about him while producing campaign-ready material for his rival. Bloomberg's framing puts Meta in the role Elon Musk's X occupied in 2022, when Brazilian judges ordered content removals and the service was briefly banned.

The complaint turns on a tooling asymmetry Brazilian outlets reproduced: prompts combining Lula's first name with his ballot number, 13, were refused, while the same pattern pairing "Flávio" and "22" with right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro returned usable images using the candidate's real photo. Lula's campaign separately filed to disqualify Bolsonaro's ticket, arguing that restrictions on its own accounts, combined with advantages in the distribution of pro-Bolsonaro posts including AI-generated content, undermined a level playing field.

Meta told the electoral court on October 20 that it has complied with the order and gives equal treatment to both candidates. The company blamed a loophole involving generic first names combined with electoral numbers, which it said briefly blocked image generation for the president while leaving Flávio Bolsonaro's prompts working for another day. Meta then temporarily banned candidate recommendations and AI image generation for presidential contenders, and restricted prompts containing candidates' first names and ballot numbers. The company denies political bias; it attributed the incidents to technical failures, and the ruling lands against a broader split in how campaigns are using the technology, with US midterm Democrats shunning AI ads this cycle as the right spends heavily on them.

With Lula and Bolsonaro tied in polls going into the Oct. 25 vote, Bloomberg notes reaching the right audience "could be key in defining the result of the election unfolding in one of Meta's most lucrative markets."