It is somewhat confusing to me that more countries don't treat Meta as a political threat. China's approach to restricting access to western internet companies looks more and more reasonable in hindsight. The US tech giants appear to be politically active and becoming more and more willing to influence elections. I don't like the strategic situation of any anti-US political parties with Facebook in the mix (not a comment on Lula, about whos policies I know little).
That being said, it is a complex issue. There are countries that refuse to embrace US style free speech and so there is a natural pressure to move political speech to US-controlled media platforms as a result. The average quality of the chatter is higher.
There is a lot of money involved in getting Bolsonaro back in power:
> Brazil’s government announced Friday that annual deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988 [. . .] During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60% [0]
This highlights the greatest difference between these two candidates (imo), one wants to preserve the 'lungs of the Earth', the other wants to rip them out for profit and give the world a middle finger on their way out.
If you have a high enough degree of certainty somebody could have a 99% chance of winning with an expected 50.1%/49.9% split. For the split to mean anything you need to know the confidence/variance.
Because the rain in most of Brazil depend on the Amazon. If the forest is gone, we will have desertification in the most populous regions of Brazil. The southeast is already facing droughts periodically, and it will get worse with more deforestation. With less rain we will produce less food, which means not only that food will become more expensive in Brazil (and a lot of people will face hunger), but we also depend on the agricultural output to avoid a trade deficit. Less rain means less food exports which means less dollars getting into Brazil, which will, among other things, turn Brazil into a hotter Argentine.
No seriously. There's a flying river, kilometers high in the sky, that goes from the Amazon to various Brazilian regions. It transports more water than the Amazon river itself (which is already the river with the highest discharge of the world). The water source is transpiration from Amazonian trees. Without the trees, the flying river is gone
Sure. Industrialization comes first though. We can care about jungles if we ever reach superpower status.
This climate nonsense is a tax on developing nations. We're sacrificing for the planet, meanwhile the US puts a couple centuries of distance between us.
Seems like a false dichotomy, don't see how sacrificing jungle would get Brazil a top-tier semiconductor industry.
And I guess the native peoples living in the Amazon are not university leftists.
I'm not into Brazilian politics, the little I know seems to indicate that it's a choice between a rock and a hard place (both seem to have corruption allegations). The objective aspect I can judge is whom Trump strongly supports. US influence in South America is a pretty bloody chapter in history.
Instead of actually reindustrializing Brazil, he anesthetized the population with handouts and lined his pockets. Meanwhile, banks are literally raking in record profits.
I wouldn't attribute an eventual Lula defeat to this, however.
His 3rd term was terrible, dozens of new taxes were implemented, living costs rose, purchasing power declined, and it became obvious that he was governing through the supreme court. His campaign was overconfident and taken completely off guard when they got utterly eviscerated in the 1st round of elections earlier this month. Left wing desperation was palpable.
Partidarian judges and journalists did everything they could to help Lula, but after the presidential debates on live television, it's pretty much over. There's just no way this guy is even fit to lead the nation ever again.
>Lula went on national television and said he's going to end police in reply to Bolsonaro vowing to classify the drug traffickers as narcoterrorists.
Without knowing much about Brazilian politics, all I can say is that I strongly doubt this. And at least a quick Google AI question suggests that your statement is not just off but completely false.
You and everyone else who's seen them know: these presidential debates are a JOKE. Just straight up biased towards high impact cuts for people zoned out of their minds on echo chambered social feeds
I know. Doesn't change the fact he said it and went viral on social media two days before the election. Whatever it is he was trying and failing to say, I seriously doubt he's going to recover from the attempt.
I wouldn't put much stock into the "fact checking" newspapers that AIs are sourcing truth from either. Those are all known to be biased towards him. They'll do everything in their power to paint him in a favorable light.
When I did a quick search in brave it agreed with the statement:
"Yes, during a televised debate on October 23, 2026, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated that his government would "end the police" if reelected. The comment occurred while he was discussing the approval of the PEC da Segurança (Security Public Amendment) and the creation of a new Ministry of Public Security. "
I tried google and he did in fact say it:
"During the TV Globo presidential debate on October 23, 2026, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated: "Aprovada a PEC da Segurança eu vou criar o Ministério e ai você vai ver o que é um governo acabar, sabe, com a polícia e deixar o território livre""
Although google says that he might have been being sarcastic, and gave some additional defenses. I googled "Did Lula say he was going to end police recently?" and got these responses.
Im surprised that you got such a different result in such a short time frame, especially the "completely false" thing, as it's not far off the direct quote. What did you google?
I did a quick search and found it was a gaffe that was corrected in the debate afterwards. The video section was isolated/clipped and spread on TikTok, etc.
Surely there must be an official fact-checking website for the election.
Given all the egregious things Trump has said on national TV and had the MAGA folks contort themselves into knots trying to explain and justify what he said, It's hardly the political death sentence that it used to be.
I don't doubt it. His fans will vote for him no matter what he says or what he does. He literally got a call from Epstein while in jail and nobody cares.
Anything could happen in the next few hours... Just saying that it doesn't look good for him.
> [Auto-Translated] The Sleeping Giants Brazil report analyzes 300 Reels of 30 Instagram profiles to investigate evidence of algorithmic favoring to federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG). Its ten videos totaled 410.5 million views, nearly three times the total of the 90 videos of the other nine MPs analyzed. In views by follower, its performance was 17.2 times the typical value of these deputies, 29.3 times that of the largest Brazilian profiles and 33.7 times that of the largest profiles in the world. His average viewing was behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, surpassing celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. The study documents a persistent disparity that requires more transparency from the Meta, although public data does not allow it to determine its causes.
Both sides are pulling record levels of engagement. It's a colosseum out there. But yes, one of the sides is more automated as usual. Most of the left engagement is human driven.
Looks at least partially organic to me, the guy is very cute and looking at his youtube video it is full of female commenters and has 2.7m subscribers.
So he is a celebrity and not just a politician, probably a lot of women are in love with him.
At a certain point the big social media companies are going to have to publish their algorithms and/or let you choose your own re: friends updates, friends of friends, things your friends or friends of friends liked, etc. Make your algorithm too opaque and you run the risk of outrage engagement showing up as "the platform pushed this" whatwver that happens to be.
I would go further and make them liable for what they show. Sure it's user created content. But the feed is entirely curated by them. They decide what to show and what not and they should be liable as such.
The US government is not a fan of other sovereign nations (even Western-aligned ones) from gaining "algorithmic sovereignty", as was seen when Australia tried to do so recently and received a stern threat from the US State Department.
The American propaganda platforms (especially Meta and X) have been weaponised to interfere in foreign elections for a long time. Brazil is just the latest example from South America. It is also happening in Europe. It is a stated goal of the Trump regime to change European governments which are not aligned with Trumpism.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/donald...
I do believe the US interference in flipping most of latin america to the right the last few years reached levels we haven't seen in decades and the magnitude of the machinery behind that is something we have never seen before. Trump surely got quite a few puppet governments with the likes of Milei, Noboa, here with the incredibly corrupt de la espriella and now Brazil in the verge to have another Bolsonaro.
If anything, many in Brazil feel a social media decline or stagnation. Orkut was poised to restart here and was met with great anticipation. Good market to new novel social media ideas.
Somehow something like Baidu web doesn’t seem too bad now. Brazil could use some sovereign tech.
"Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false"
Weird how it keeps happening (e.g. just last week, Instagram and the No Kings account), and it's always to the benefit of right-wing extremists. I'm sure it's just an accident, though, surely they wouldn't lie on the internet.
Facebook has also made content decisions that have hurt right wing interests in the past, such as in 2020 when they banned several accounts affiliated with Bolsonaro
I only use FB occasionally for marketplace with an empty account. All that it's ever suggesting in the home feed is hateful, right-wing content. Never anything positive. It's so sad that that's what drives the metrics these people care about. If this is your job, shame on you!
No, the last thing US Democrats need is to squander their time on endless questioning.
Some of that is going to be inevitable for impeachment and conviction of course, which are most certainly necessary for traitor Grump and his Supreme Council justifiers as well.
But as for this issue? Strike the root, don't get bogged down in endless bickering about how power was probably abused. Rather, put an end to the capabilities being available to abuse to begin with. Imagine a US GDPR, along with anti-trust legislation/enforcement that un-ties Faceboot-the-app from Faceboot-the-hosting-service, mandating open APIs that facilitate vibrant competition in both markets.
Don't be fooled. Whatever it is that Meta is doing, it's only a fraction of what Lula, his party and his supreme court ministers did to the Brazilian right wing. Censorship was the least of it.
I'm not even denying that it's happening. I'm just saying I don't care.
No, it's the lawnmower analogy again: Zuckerberg has no political views, he just thinks that Trump will restrict him less/allow him to make more money/is easier to exploit.
I think it's more that they happen to be aligned. Left-wing parties are more likely to tax and regulate Meta than radical right parties. So it's for their own profit. But Trump is also mostly there for enriching the oligarchy, he often has the same priorities.
It is somewhat confusing to me that more countries don't treat Meta as a political threat. China's approach to restricting access to western internet companies looks more and more reasonable in hindsight. The US tech giants appear to be politically active and becoming more and more willing to influence elections. I don't like the strategic situation of any anti-US political parties with Facebook in the mix (not a comment on Lula, about whos policies I know little).
That being said, it is a complex issue. There are countries that refuse to embrace US style free speech and so there is a natural pressure to move political speech to US-controlled media platforms as a result. The average quality of the chatter is higher.
> It is somewhat confusing to me that more countries don't treat Meta as a political threat
Lobbying and bribes aren't confusing
There is a lot of money involved in getting Bolsonaro back in power:
> Brazil’s government announced Friday that annual deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988 [. . .] During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60% [0]
This highlights the greatest difference between these two candidates (imo), one wants to preserve the 'lungs of the Earth', the other wants to rip them out for profit and give the world a middle finger on their way out.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/brazil-amazon-deforestation-lula-...
Well that sucks then: https://polymarket.com/event/brazil-presidential-election
80% chance Bolsonaro wins.
https://globalelectionsimulator.com/brazil/
Election starts a few hours from now. We'll know the results by tonight.FWIW, these two datums aren't mutually exclusive.
If you have a high enough degree of certainty somebody could have a 99% chance of winning with an expected 50.1%/49.9% split. For the split to mean anything you need to know the confidence/variance.
brazilians are extremely poor, even with the programmes that try to masquerade the numbers.
why would they care about the amazon if they barely have any money?
climate pov is a first world luxury. no one serious about this election would even attempt to make.
Because the rain in most of Brazil depend on the Amazon. If the forest is gone, we will have desertification in the most populous regions of Brazil. The southeast is already facing droughts periodically, and it will get worse with more deforestation. With less rain we will produce less food, which means not only that food will become more expensive in Brazil (and a lot of people will face hunger), but we also depend on the agricultural output to avoid a trade deficit. Less rain means less food exports which means less dollars getting into Brazil, which will, among other things, turn Brazil into a hotter Argentine.
https://piaui.uol.com.br/web/six-conclusions-about-model-of-...
No seriously. There's a flying river, kilometers high in the sky, that goes from the Amazon to various Brazilian regions. It transports more water than the Amazon river itself (which is already the river with the highest discharge of the world). The water source is transpiration from Amazonian trees. Without the trees, the flying river is gone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_river
> Less rain means less food exports which means less dollars getting into Brazil
Why not industrialize instead of exporting soy and meat until the end of time?
Why not both?
Sure. Industrialization comes first though. We can care about jungles if we ever reach superpower status.
This climate nonsense is a tax on developing nations. We're sacrificing for the planet, meanwhile the US puts a couple centuries of distance between us.
If I had a button that would burn that entire jungle down and replace it with a top tier national semiconductor industry, I'd press it twice.
Only university leftists care about the Amazon to the point they sacrifice national interests for it. Completely disconnected from reality.
> Europe is not worried about the trees in the Amazon, they want the subsoil.
Dr. Enéas Carneiro.
It's all about the rare earths.
You need to go for a walk in nature. There’s more to life than semi-conductors. Sad!
Wanna trade?
Transfer all your technology to us. We'll give you the Amazon.
Seems like a false dichotomy, don't see how sacrificing jungle would get Brazil a top-tier semiconductor industry.
And I guess the native peoples living in the Amazon are not university leftists.
I'm not into Brazilian politics, the little I know seems to indicate that it's a choice between a rock and a hard place (both seem to have corruption allegations). The objective aspect I can judge is whom Trump strongly supports. US influence in South America is a pretty bloody chapter in history.
> don't see how sacrificing jungle would get Brazil a top-tier semiconductor industry.
It wouldn't. It was just a rhetorical device to express the fact I care far more about national industrial and economic development than some jungle.
> US influence in South America is a pretty bloody chapter in history.
I agree, but Lula's no paragon here. He's had ~20 years to undo the neoliberal privatization policies enacted as of the Washington Consensus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus
Instead of actually reindustrializing Brazil, he anesthetized the population with handouts and lined his pockets. Meanwhile, banks are literally raking in record profits.
It’s sad but it’s real and it’s happening. In Brazilian news, this is actively being exploded upon and it is not reaching mainstream media properly.
[1] - https://www.instagram.com/reel/De2BfVRD30o
[2] - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/16/meta-employees-...
I wouldn't attribute an eventual Lula defeat to this, however.
His 3rd term was terrible, dozens of new taxes were implemented, living costs rose, purchasing power declined, and it became obvious that he was governing through the supreme court. His campaign was overconfident and taken completely off guard when they got utterly eviscerated in the 1st round of elections earlier this month. Left wing desperation was palpable.
Partidarian judges and journalists did everything they could to help Lula, but after the presidential debates on live television, it's pretty much over. There's just no way this guy is even fit to lead the nation ever again.
Funny, that sounds exactly like what an American right-winger would say about Biden in 2024.
I guess Brazil is about to experience a shit-show similar to what the US is going through now, then. Not much hope left anywhere.
Lula went on national television and said he's going to end police in reply to Bolsonaro vowing to classify the drug traffickers as narcoterrorists.
It's not even a lie. These leftists do want to abolish the police and create a bolivarian national guard or whatever.
He said this despite the fact organized drug gangs have been known to wage literal drone warfare in Rio de Janeiro. I'm not even kidding.
https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/sudeste/rj/operacao-no...
I seriously doubt he's going to recover from this.
>Lula went on national television and said he's going to end police in reply to Bolsonaro vowing to classify the drug traffickers as narcoterrorists.
Without knowing much about Brazilian politics, all I can say is that I strongly doubt this. And at least a quick Google AI question suggests that your statement is not just off but completely false.
You can doubt all you want. It's on the record. It was said in national television.
He literally said those words. I heard them. Whole nation heard them. I saved a video of it.
Most charitable interpretation possible is he's too senile and doesn't know what he's saying anymore. Not a good look either way.
He also closed the 1st presidential debate by saying that if he won, Brazil would end. Just another one of those moments.
You and everyone else who's seen them know: these presidential debates are a JOKE. Just straight up biased towards high impact cuts for people zoned out of their minds on echo chambered social feeds
I know. Doesn't change the fact he said it and went viral on social media two days before the election. Whatever it is he was trying and failing to say, I seriously doubt he's going to recover from the attempt.
I wouldn't put much stock into the "fact checking" newspapers that AIs are sourcing truth from either. Those are all known to be biased towards him. They'll do everything in their power to paint him in a favorable light.
When I did a quick search in brave it agreed with the statement: "Yes, during a televised debate on October 23, 2026, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated that his government would "end the police" if reelected. The comment occurred while he was discussing the approval of the PEC da Segurança (Security Public Amendment) and the creation of a new Ministry of Public Security. "
I tried google and he did in fact say it: "During the TV Globo presidential debate on October 23, 2026, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stated: "Aprovada a PEC da Segurança eu vou criar o Ministério e ai você vai ver o que é um governo acabar, sabe, com a polícia e deixar o território livre""
Although google says that he might have been being sarcastic, and gave some additional defenses. I googled "Did Lula say he was going to end police recently?" and got these responses.
Im surprised that you got such a different result in such a short time frame, especially the "completely false" thing, as it's not far off the direct quote. What did you google?
I did a quick search and found it was a gaffe that was corrected in the debate afterwards. The video section was isolated/clipped and spread on TikTok, etc.
Surely there must be an official fact-checking website for the election.
Given all the egregious things Trump has said on national TV and had the MAGA folks contort themselves into knots trying to explain and justify what he said, It's hardly the political death sentence that it used to be.
I don't doubt it. His fans will vote for him no matter what he says or what he does. He literally got a call from Epstein while in jail and nobody cares.
Anything could happen in the next few hours... Just saying that it doesn't look good for him.
At the same time, some candidates from the opposition are getting more views than Beyoncé and other artists known globally.
https://sleepinggiantsbrasil.com/biblioteca/visualizacoes-de... (portuguese)
To save others a couple clicks:
> [Auto-Translated] The Sleeping Giants Brazil report analyzes 300 Reels of 30 Instagram profiles to investigate evidence of algorithmic favoring to federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG). Its ten videos totaled 410.5 million views, nearly three times the total of the 90 videos of the other nine MPs analyzed. In views by follower, its performance was 17.2 times the typical value of these deputies, 29.3 times that of the largest Brazilian profiles and 33.7 times that of the largest profiles in the world. His average viewing was behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, surpassing celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. The study documents a persistent disparity that requires more transparency from the Meta, although public data does not allow it to determine its causes.
Both sides are pulling record levels of engagement. It's a colosseum out there. But yes, one of the sides is more automated as usual. Most of the left engagement is human driven.
Looks at least partially organic to me, the guy is very cute and looking at his youtube video it is full of female commenters and has 2.7m subscribers.
So he is a celebrity and not just a politician, probably a lot of women are in love with him.
At a certain point the big social media companies are going to have to publish their algorithms and/or let you choose your own re: friends updates, friends of friends, things your friends or friends of friends liked, etc. Make your algorithm too opaque and you run the risk of outrage engagement showing up as "the platform pushed this" whatwver that happens to be.
I would go further and make them liable for what they show. Sure it's user created content. But the feed is entirely curated by them. They decide what to show and what not and they should be liable as such.
The US government is not a fan of other sovereign nations (even Western-aligned ones) from gaining "algorithmic sovereignty", as was seen when Australia tried to do so recently and received a stern threat from the US State Department.
X did publish their algorithms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310291
They set the standard in transparency.
I suspect this has been part of 4chan’s lasting appeal: a dead simple algorithm that can be independently verified via timestamps.
I don't think anything will force them to do this. Can you elaborate on why you think they'll be forced to do this?
Algorithms are something we should definitely regulate, as a generalization of social media and Ai decisions over human lives.
I'd like to see something like ATProtocol feeds forced upon these companies, anyone can create any kind of feed, it works in all clients.
meta employees will look at this and think that their job isn't political. what a j o k e.
More people should be aware of the Buddhist precept of “right livelihood”.
The American propaganda platforms (especially Meta and X) have been weaponised to interfere in foreign elections for a long time. Brazil is just the latest example from South America. It is also happening in Europe. It is a stated goal of the Trump regime to change European governments which are not aligned with Trumpism. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/donald...
I do believe the US interference in flipping most of latin america to the right the last few years reached levels we haven't seen in decades and the magnitude of the machinery behind that is something we have never seen before. Trump surely got quite a few puppet governments with the likes of Milei, Noboa, here with the incredibly corrupt de la espriella and now Brazil in the verge to have another Bolsonaro.
If anything, many in Brazil feel a social media decline or stagnation. Orkut was poised to restart here and was met with great anticipation. Good market to new novel social media ideas.
Somehow something like Baidu web doesn’t seem too bad now. Brazil could use some sovereign tech.
"Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false"
Weird how it keeps happening (e.g. just last week, Instagram and the No Kings account), and it's always to the benefit of right-wing extremists. I'm sure it's just an accident, though, surely they wouldn't lie on the internet.
They also repeatedly suspended Dutch LGBTQIA+ accounts:
https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/23/meta-suspends-dozens-dutch-lgb...
It's time countries started suspending Facebook/Instagram for meddling in national affairs.
Title: Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election: Report
> don't editorialize.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apologies! Fixed the title now
Did you expect more from FaceBook?
It’s just a technical issue that seems to magically and repeatedly happen in favor of right wing interests. Crazy how that just works out some times.
Whoopsie! A slight technical error that aligns with the politics of the White House, it's wild how that happens from time to time to time to time...
It's not the white house, it is always the right wing. When the white house is left wing Facebook is still right wing.
Because capital is right wing and capital will act to preserve and concentrate power.
The Brazilian left has done much worse than whatever it is that Meta is doing.
> We have defeated Bolsonarism!
Luís Roberto Barroso, former Brazilian Supreme Court Justice.
Facebook has also made content decisions that have hurt right wing interests in the past, such as in 2020 when they banned several accounts affiliated with Bolsonaro
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/facebook-suspends-disi...
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122713
I only use FB occasionally for marketplace with an empty account. All that it's ever suggesting in the home feed is hateful, right-wing content. Never anything positive. It's so sad that that's what drives the metrics these people care about. If this is your job, shame on you!
I hope to see Mark dragged in front of congress every day of his life next year.
No, the last thing US Democrats need is to squander their time on endless questioning.
Some of that is going to be inevitable for impeachment and conviction of course, which are most certainly necessary for traitor Grump and his Supreme Council justifiers as well.
But as for this issue? Strike the root, don't get bogged down in endless bickering about how power was probably abused. Rather, put an end to the capabilities being available to abuse to begin with. Imagine a US GDPR, along with anti-trust legislation/enforcement that un-ties Faceboot-the-app from Faceboot-the-hosting-service, mandating open APIs that facilitate vibrant competition in both markets.
For flexing muscles and advancing U.S. foreign policy goals abroad? Doubt it.
Don't be fooled. Whatever it is that Meta is doing, it's only a fraction of what Lula, his party and his supreme court ministers did to the Brazilian right wing. Censorship was the least of it.
I'm not even denying that it's happening. I'm just saying I don't care.
Is this a Trump thing?
Like is the motivation to please Trump and ask for stuff/be left alone? Or is Zuckerberg really gone full right wing globally?
No, it's the lawnmower analogy again: Zuckerberg has no political views, he just thinks that Trump will restrict him less/allow him to make more money/is easier to exploit.
It would absolutely strike me as a Trump thing, yes. We have a habit of mirroring the US, and it shows
Facebook always aligns with the right wing no matter if the white house is left wing or right wing.
Possibly. All things point to Bolsonaro's son winning the election today. He's a Trump ally.
If the Brazilian right wins, then it will mean that not a single left wing party has won an election in South America since the end of USAID.
I think it's more that they happen to be aligned. Left-wing parties are more likely to tax and regulate Meta than radical right parties. So it's for their own profit. But Trump is also mostly there for enriching the oligarchy, he often has the same priorities.
damned if you do, damned if you don't
By which frame of comparison do you say they were ever "damned even though they didn't"?