Meta has been entrusting more content review work to artificial intelligence over the past year. In the past few weeks, this Facebook and its parent company Instagram have faced allegations of election interference in Brazil and the United States, while Meta largely attributes these errors to their automated systems.
These accusations come from an incumbent president, a nationwide protest movement, and a U.S. Senate candidate. Meanwhile, as a S&P 500 company with revenues of $201 billion last year, Meta is accelerating its transition from manual reviewers to large language models.
In March, Meta announced that it would launch a more advanced AI content enforcement system. By June, large language models had already replaced human reviewers in handling about half of the review requests. According to a report by The Financial Times, Meta aims to achieve an automation rate of 90% or higher for certain types of violations by the end of 2026. Meta told the newspaper that its models make 13% fewer errors than human reviewers and can detect 10% more violations; however, some employees warn that this transition is proceeding too quickly and that there is insufficient supervision.
In 2018, on the eve of the general elections in Brazil and the United States, Facebook established a "war room" composed of over twenty experts to deal with election interference. Eight years later, as these two countries once again held elections, Meta now refers to this war room as an election operations center. However, an increasing portion of platform governance work has shifted from human intervention to software-based solutions.
According to a report released in October by the research institution “Strategic Dialogue Institute,” platforms are increasingly relying on “crowdsourcing and automated systems” rather than human supervision. The report found that there is very little disclosure about how these systems operate or how they are tested, and stated: “In the rapidly changing electoral cycle, using them as the primary means of supervision remains an unproven proposition.”
These cases that occurred this autumn demonstrate what can happen when these systems fail during election time, and also explain why the explanations provided by Meta rarely satisfy those affected.
Meta did not respond to Fortune's request for a comment.
Meta Why Involved with the Brazilian Electoral Court
Despite the claims from Meta's rival team that they attempted to limit their online influence, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva still won his fourth term in the runoff election on October 25th. Meta attributed the issue to a technical error.
Lula's campaign team filed a lawsuit with Brazil's Supreme Electoral Court on October 10, accusing Meta of using biased algorithms and AI to favor their opponent Jair Bolsonaro. In this petition and subsequent documents, the campaign team cited instances where Meta's automatic translation system translated "Flavio, future prisoner!!" as "Flavio, future president!!", and also accused Meta of restricting the sharing of some of Lula's posts.
According to a report by the São Paulo Page, an employee of Meta admitted in internal communications that Lula's account faced more restrictions than Bolsonaro's account.
On October 15th, the court ordered Meta to treat both candidates equally, otherwise they would face a fine of 500,000 reais per day, which is approximately 98,000 US dollars. After determining that Meta's initial response was insufficient, the court requested on October 19th that the company prove within 24 hours that it had not restricted either candidate.
Reuters reported that the document submitted by Meta listed 17 measures, including that any automatic restrictions on presidential campaign advertising accounts must undergo manual review within two hours. The company denied treating the two candidates differently and stated that the issue stemmed from a technical error. Later, Bolsonaro's campaign team also joined the case, claiming that they too had been unfairly treated.
The Brazilian Electoral Prosecution Office informed the court that Meta did not fully comply with the relevant rulings, including an order requiring it to explain how the AI tool handled content related to each candidate. The prosecution believes that the errors encountered by different candidates were not the same, which undermines Meta's explanation of technical errors.
Lula won the runoff election with 51.8% of the valid votes. The Electoral Court has not yet decided whether to impose a fine on Meta; meanwhile, the federal prosecutor who initiated an investigation into the account suspension on October 14th also filed a civil lawsuit against Meta on October 21st.
No Kings Why was there a moment of loss of contact on the day of the operation?
On October 17th, during the fourth national “No Kings” action day aimed at encouraging early voting, Meta suspended the alliance’s Instagram account, according to MS NOW. Organizers stated that the account was taken down around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, which was during the peak period of the event, and remained offline for about 90 minutes. Even after it became visible again, administrators were unable to access it for several hours.
The alliance also stated on Threads that they have received reports indicating that “#NoKings and early voting content are inaccessible, restricted, or seem to be suppressed on various platforms of Meta.”
Meta's explanation for the incident changed overnight. On that day, Andy Stone, the Vice President of Communications at Meta, attributed it to an abnormally high frequency of posts, shares, and comments. The next day, he wrote on X that the company's network security system detected 'the use of Claude tools to read personal profiles, posts, and topic tags during peak hours,' and the company's 'automated protection measures' mistakenly resulted in the account being taken down.
Stone wrote, "We would like to sincerely apologize for this mistake once again." The alliance's social media team then informed Ars Technica that they were using Anthropic's AI model Claude to search for keywords and hashtags in order to track online discussions.
Subsequently, the alliance sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, asking whether Meta had any communication with the Trump administration regarding this incident or the mid-term elections in 2026. The letter also inquired about how Meta's "whitelist agreement" – which is used to protect certain high-profile accounts from automatic removal – treated Trump and his allies, and whether it was different from No Kings and other "civil society actions that encourage voter participation".
On October 21st, in their response, the alliance stated that Meta apologized again and proposed to meet with their technical experts. Subsequently, the alliance replied that the company did not provide any substantial response and requested a meeting with the senior management of Meta.
On October 22, five Democratic senators led by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded that Meta provide records of their communications with the Trump administration regarding the No Kings incident, stating that the company's "constant changing explanations" were concerning. On October 30, the alliance stated that they had met with senior management from Meta, but at the end of the talks, Meta did not make any substantial commitments to change its practices or establish safeguards.
What happened to Angie Nixon's Latino voter recruitment page?
On October 27th, Instagram removed a Spanish-language account created by the campaign team of Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate candidate from Florida, which was intended to reach out to Latino voters. At that time, the campaign team was posting on a rally to encourage voting in Oscola County.
Nixon wrote on X: “We call on Meta to immediately restore that page and provide an explanation for its removal.” She also shared a suspension notice sent by Instagram. The account was restored the next morning.
A spokesperson from Meta told Newsweek that since this account was created only one and a half weeks ago, "our system automatically and mistakenly identified it as impersonating the Nixon, for, and Senate campaign."
The anti-Trump organization movement 50501 – a name that represents 50 protests, 50 states, and one movement – issued a statement on Instagram, linking this pause with the No Kings incident, and calling for “transparency and accountability beyond technical explanations.”
What could possibly force Meta to respond?
The Supervisory Committee of Meta is an organization funded by Meta but operates independently, responsible for reviewing content moderation decisions. The committee criticized "repeated law enforcement failures" in the work of ensuring the integrity of Meta's elections, and mentioned the suspension of the No Kings account as well as Meta's "excessive law enforcement" when implementing anti-fraud policies against Lula's advertising accounts. The statement does not imply that these two incidents had political motives, and Meta is not subject to its jurisdiction.
Attorneys General from 13 states and the District of Columbia have requested that Meta explain the suspension of the No Kings account, as well as how it distinguishes between "legitimate political activities" and harmful "bot" traffic. Robert Garcia, a Congressman from California, and Jamie Raskin, a Congressman from Maryland – who are the Democratic leaders of the House Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee, respectively – have demanded a briefing by November 9th.
Ruskin said, "We need to document and explain how this happened, and whether there were any individuals from the Trump administration involved in it."
None of these requirements have legal enforceability. In Brazil, whether the Electoral Court imposes fines and the outcome of prosecutions by the prosecution will test whether the government can force Meta to respond. In the United States, it depends on today's voting: if the Democrats win the House of Representatives, Garcia and Laskin are expected to become chairpersons of the committee and will have the power to summon relevant responses, issuing subpoenas regarding some of the same issues.
