This is just one of the many claims, like

- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)

- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.

- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over

- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues

There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.

I can vouch for having seen this firsthand on Meta AI assistants, the same behavior showing up for many close friends as well as colleagues.

This used to be an under the hood and frowned upon type of maneuver, but now it is much more rampant and far reaching thanks to AI

Thank you. As far as circumstantial evidence goes, yours is more intriguing and cause for inquiry.

Yup, it seems unfathomable to some commentators that the likes of AfD or Le Pen or Bolsonaro would get popular support were it not for US big tech (interference). Which truly boggles the mind, it seems to be the same narrative that couldn't believe Hillary lost the election and it was the russians fault. Even if that were true, you should still review your policies and how you ran the campaign and learn something from it. Here it's like we're in a world with no reinforcement learning feedback loop.

You were satisfied with the level of understanding the person you replied to provided.

That person was then politely told to rtfa and given more substance than they thought was in there.

And what did you do?

That’s quite ironic.

Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.

As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.

I see the opposite: the OP cherry picked the weakest of a long list of examples. The other reactions you’re seeing in the thread are based on all the discoveries, not just that one.

It’s disappointing to see it upvoted to the top of the thread. Seems many people are looking to dismiss the issue rather than fully consider it.

Look at this thread and you could think that the quoted example was the first, or main one, in the article.

When in fact, it comes after

> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.

> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.

> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions

> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”

> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.

And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:

> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.

That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.

And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.

I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is proof of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?

Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".

And also, imprisoning him of course was a strong move that also needs justification.

But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.

Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.

The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".

Regardless of anyone's political affiliation: Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.

I mean, ideally I'd have Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey and friends in jail forcreating social networks where conflict is rewarded and pushed in front of everyone, leading to the collapse of the social fabric we're seeing throughout the world right now, but censorship is fine by me in the mean time.

your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.

Yes, I would love to block American social media companies from meddling with the elections of my country. Like you did with TikTok, for example, when your government forced ByteDance to sell to an American company to continue operating. Fucking hypocrisy is palpable.

> ... but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.

Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not). Some of our first childhood lessons are "Lying is bad" and "Two wrongs don't make a right". Beyond ridiculous that the (supposedly adult) people in charge of our nation and corporations aren't able to handle lessons that most of the rest of us learn and understand as tiny children.

Facebook certainly hasn’t forgotten; they were just fined $25 billion over that.

I'm interested, do we know that people decide how to vote based on gif options presented on apps?

I'm not sure i want to live in that world.

I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was largely made up in similar ways. Data privacy is important, but much of the data they “stole” seems to me to be within then-contemporary expectations for third party access, and I’ve never seen a coherent explanation of how collecting this data disrupted elections.

Perhaps in Brazil it’s illegal for political messages go viral on social media at all? Then I could see how there’s an issue here. But that isn’t my understanding.

Well if you're Brazil, the entirety of Meta is a foreign actor - Meta is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the United States of America.

To assume that Evil Corp Inc. does evil things? They should just turn the platform off because it seems is only thing that works as a bargaining chip with such powerful entities.

Why should it?

I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.

I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").

Why would it be evenly distributed? Humans pick 7 out of 1-10 most often. LLMs should do the same if you force them to zeroshot it. This comes up every week on twitter and reddit. Eg https://www.reddit.com/r/AgentsOfAI/comments/1x6doo3/can_any...

btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.

> Why is the AI so skewed?

We are talking about 2 trials, right? Or did they do more repetitions?

What would be the "correct" numbers to get from 2 trials that show an even distribution?

Because it is not a prng. If you want a prng, don't use the thing that is not a prng (or at the very least, ask that thing to use one)

Because the AI is trained on real world data and in the real world real people are making a gigantic amount of images and posts in support for the two biggest candidates.

One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.

You phrase this as a "gotcha" but I don't think you understand that NGOs and nonprofits are the exact kind of entity that would naturally be involved here.

Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.

If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.

> realize that you need to have your own social media

How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?

I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.

> Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv

There is a national broadcast apparatus in Germany, directly funded by the people in form of mandatory household monthly contributions. It definitely needs improvements and is far from ideal but it doesn’t work at behest of government (budget pressures, etc.). It was designed to resist the top down pressure from the admins (lessons learned from what Nazis did). AfD along with some private news networks backed by the likes of Telekom are really pushing to abolish it.

Germany is even more corrupt than the current US but is more subtle about it. I'd almost rather have German media censored by the US than by Germany, because the US can't arrest German people in Germany for their posts, but the German government does.

one day they will realize - everobody realized long time ago, its info war friend. Germans for example own 90% of polish media and are growing our younglings to be ashamed to be polish

> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always

They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.

They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.

Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.

YouTube definitely provides recommendations based on your watch history and overall profile.

Yeah. I never get any AfD videos on my youtube feed (living in germany). I guess Meta isnt pushing right wing narratives then. Phew, we got lucky

Similar, but more slop and less evil.

I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me all actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).

Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.

I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".

Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.

I love how everyone from every political background thinks big tech has it out for them specifically. No, it couldn't be that algorithms are stochastic and random and sometimes ban random people. The tech companies are trying to manipulate everyone, every single side, into some goal only they understand.

Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.

On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.

The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.

The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.

That's an interpretation I've already seen in other replies. But that's not the idea.

Just visit the website of the NED and look at the many projects the US government finances around the world to meddle in these countries politically in favor of US interests[1]. Nations have to protect themselves against these foreign influences, otherwise they will be eaten alive.

NGOs are just one tool of exerting political influence in foreign nations.

Much more powerful are proprietary digital services like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Their algorithms control what information people consume every day. If you are the CIA or the NED, that's the tool you need to exert influence on the thinking of the predominantly younger people in foreign countries (e.g. flush anti-China news into the Facebook feeds of younger users in Myanmar or Thailand).

That's why the US government wanted to move control of TikTok within the US to a domestic organization. They knew what was going on.

EDIT: Just take a look at the NED website about Asia[1]. They don't even hide it: 295 projects in 13 Asian countries with a budget of over 50M$ to promote 'democracy' (i.e. US interest, anti-China propaganda). These countries need to act aggressively against these NGOs, because these NGOs do not act in the interests of the country and it's people.

[1]: Example: https://www.ned.org/region/asia-2/

You're the one paranoid about "putinism" so that explains where that came from. The GP said nothing of what you are interpreting. The US itself has a firm grasp on what information reaches its people, so what are you saying?

But this law may be impossible to comply, without basically shutting down Facebook. The complaints include that Bolsonaro is first in politician search results (someone has to be first), and that asking Meta’s LLM for a random number gives Bolsonaro’s ballot number before Lula’s.

As opposed to a senile Brazilian felon?

We have had a senile president recently but its not that one.

Trump was censored by social networks long before January 2021, under all kinds of bullshit reasons.

There were literal genocides conducted on the platform unobstructed at the same time. They banned him because they wanted to. Be serious.

> Who else should be exempt?

The Ayatollah.

I think most Brazilian, as other Latin American, voters would rather be a bit more like the US and less like what the left has delivered to them in the past decades.

As seen in the recent New Mexico case, it seems not to be enough.

Double the fine every day the entity in question is in violation. They will stop rather soon.

That would of course incur instant retaliatory tariffs. And the truth is that near all politicians just want to refrain from rocking the boat, hold on to power, and have a nice cushy retirement. Enacting such policies which are good for the people in the long term yet incur the wrath of the US, do the opposite for those goals.

What is this “everywhere else” you speak of. Tik tok is owned by Larry Ellison. Meta we’re talking about. Reddit? Is that smallest of platforms “everywhere else”?

Really? I've never seen CNN promote literally eating the rich.

> And hard left content is promoted everywhere else. What’s the point?

I guess it depends on what you consider to be "hard left".

If you consider anything to the left of Elon Musk's anti-immigrant, pro-White positions, unrestrained capitalism for him (although he is pro-tariffs on foreign EVs), to be "hard left", then yes, it is pretty prevalent, but I would argue that is actually representative of reality.

Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.

Is this because of your mistaken belief that the Chinese Communist party doesn't filter and censor the Internet for their subjects?

Soberaniiiiiiiiiiiia soberaniiiiiiiiiiiiia

You'll have that in the marketing, but the underlying actions will remain the same.

Yes, I think we actually agree, and maybe I should have been clearer. Of course industry leaders always try to play nicely, e.g. if liberal/democratic party is in power, they will 'wear their liberal outfit'.

Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.

I’m sure that court is not biased and those banned accounts ain’t in favor of some local factions.

Freedom of speech for me, censorship for thee.

Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like