A person holds a giant Brazilian flag while perched above a crowd of people at a rally on a large avenue, a few people are holding phones in the air. One person holds their hand in the air in the L shape, signifying support for Lula. 

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Tatiana Dias is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

Brazil is just days away from a runoff election in which the Workers’ Party (PT) candidate, incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will face far-right Liberal Party (PL) candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator and the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The race is extremely tight.

In the first round, Bolsonaro surprised many by earning more votes than Lula, while his party elected the largest far-right caucus in congressional history.

The fierce second-round campaign is playing out across social media, especially on Meta’s platforms — the main public arena for political debate in Brazil. More than 70% of Brazilians rely on Instagram 

. But day after day, evidence mounts that Meta has failed to ensure a level playing field for both candidates.

Allegations of censorship, account bans, reach suppression, and algorithmic discrimination that appear to disproportionately affect Lula and his supporters are piling up. 

 a complaint with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) on Saturday, demanding fair treatment online. Lula’s campaign 

 Meta to international observers and to the Organization of American States. The cases are also under 

scrutiny from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office

, which opened an investigation on Wednesday to examine Meta’s conduct during the elections.

 sent to the New York Times, Meta denied political interference and said that “it is unfortunate that minor technical issues are being spun into a political narrative. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

from United States President Donald Trump. Tariffs imposed by the US government, the 

 — have put external pressure on the country that is also reverberating across Latin America. In this geopolitical context, the role of Big Tech companies that are politically aligned with Trump has created an atmosphere of suspicion.

Concerning evidence has been mounting in recent weeks, and the nonprofit organization I cofounded and direct—

—has collected many examples of questionable content moderation decisions. Before the first round, such decisions 

, including Meta’s blocking of ads from the PT campaign’s official account. Now, there are also thousands of reports of restricted users, complaints about bias in Meta AI outputs, and a “technical glitch” that undermined the performance of Lula’s videos on Instagram, all favoring Bolsonaro’s PL campaign.

According to the PT campaign, the far-right candidate’s videos 

 there were technical errors in how video views were counted globally, while denying any political interference in Brazil. “We identified a technical problem affecting some video metrics. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson said.

Another basic failure was the lack of safeguards in Meta AI’s image generation related to candidates. Anyone who asks the tool to generate an image or a T-shirt design with “Flávio” and “22” — the far-right party’s ballot number — gets the request fulfilled, using the candidate’s real photo. But when asked to generate an image of Lula, the AI refuses, saying it was unable to generate the image. The test 

 by millions of Brazilians using a wide range of prompts.

Meta AI does generate images of Lula for users outside of Brazil or when using a VPN, which suggests a geo-targeted block.

 by a columnist for UOL, the Meta AI system responded: “You are right to point that out — there should not be different treatment. What happened here was: I tried to generate both banners you requested with ‘lula 13’ and the automatic safety system for images blocked it. When you requested with ‘flavio 22,’ the same system allowed it and I generated it.” In response to an additional prompt, the tool offered that “this violates the core principle of Brazilian electoral law.”

Hours after the story went viral, Meta told the press it was taking additional measures to ensure that prompts using either of the candidate’s first names and ballot number would not produce images. However, Meta AI 

 of Flávio Bolsonaro with minimal encouragement, but not of Lula.

Lula’s campaign brought the case to the TSE. “Meta AI, the artificial intelligence engine that powers all Meta-managed platforms — Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook — is, in itself, biased and seeks, at all costs, to deliver results favorable to Flávio Bolsonaro, even when the same user insists on Lula,” 

At the same time, users are reporting an unprecedented wave of post removals, profile bans, and other restrictions. CTRL+Z launched a survey shortly after the runoff was set and has so far collected more than 

of accounts that were censored, blocked, or had features restricted or experienced sudden drops in reach. More than 90% are from Lula supporters. The cases reveal what appear to be serious moderation failures and false positives, including activist posts that are misclassified as child sexual abuse material or terrorism-related content.

Accounts belonging to social movements — including journalists’ unions; student organizations such as university student councils and LGBTQIA+ collectives, state-level chapters of the left-wing Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) — were banned without explanation and fan accounts for Madonna that had announced their support for Lula, some with over 100,000 followers, were taken down (some have since been restored). Accounts linked to the PT, Lula’s party, and the election campaign had their functionalities and reach restricted.

The majority of complaints, however, involve feature restrictions and sudden drops in reach, which have affected ordinary citizens as well as major influencers — in some cases, by up to 90%. Instagram profiles of journalist Leandro Demori, and of musician Baco Exu do Blues, both critics of Bolsonaro, are among the prominent personalities who saw dramatic declines in their metrics.

Regarding the CTRL+Z survey, which was used as the basis for the Federal Prosecutor’s Office to open its investigation following a request by a coalition of CTRL+Z, Article 19, Conectas, Sleeping Giants Brasil and others, Meta objected that it had not been given access to the full dataset and responded to a request for comment saying that “a deliberately selected sample does not reflect the scope and rigor of our content moderation work, which is aimed at ensuring equal treatment across our platforms for all. We operate in compliance with applicable law and electoral regulations.”

Superior Electoral Court faces accusations of bias

As evidence against Meta piles up, civil society is demanding action from the Superior Electoral Court. The court’s president is Kássio Nunes Marques, a justice appointed by Bolsonaro who is 

 in the Banco Master case, Brazil’s biggest corruption scandal in recent years, including with 

 that he participated in a prostitution ring run by a banker named Daniel Vorcaro, who is currently in jail.

Flávio Bolsonaro also faces allegations of links to Vorcaro. His potential election could impact the future of investigations, possibly benefiting those involved.

In the first round, Nunes Marques made no controversial rulings. In the runoff, however, he moved to suspend “Exército do Lula” (Lula’s Army), a pro-Lula support WhatsApp group created by federal congressman André Janones, also of the PT, that had gathered 3.3 million members in just a few days through coordinated campaign actions. 

, the channel promoted disinformation and instructed users to act as “bots.” The far-right candidate himself, however, also has a similar group with the same types of content, which 

remains active despite violating TSE rules.

Nunes Marques’ decision caused friction among the justices, 

 by the TSE’s inspector general, Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva, on the grounds of protecting freedom of expression, provided that those responsible for the channel refrain from disseminating or reproducing illicit content.

But the war of rulings continued. Two days later, again at the request of Bolsonaro’s party, Nunes Marques overturned Cueva’s decision and 

 the WhatsApp channel for 48 hours, arguing that it failed to comply with Meta’s terms of service. Before the period expired, however, the 

 after meeting a registration requirement.

In this context, Justice Nunes Marques has been 

Bolsonaro’s campaign in his rulings, and may face a disqualification motion filed by the Brazilian Association of Jurists for Democracy. PT’s president, congressman Rui Falcão, 

 to the Supreme Federal Court on grounds of Nunes Marques’ partisan bias.

to collect additional reports of “digital censorship”. Separately, 

 the TSE to demand that Meta immediately restore unjustifiably blocked content and banned accounts; provide special protections for the profiles of journalists, news outlets, and social movements; end the apparent practice of 

; and be transparent about the numbers and criteria behind its removals.

With a decisive election in the presidential race just days away, whether Brazilian institutions can extract answers — and where necessary, action — from Meta is an open question. The answer will matter far beyond Brazil.

James Ball is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

The United Kingdom’s election watchdog is developing an AI-powered system designed to notify candidates of significant deepfakes within three hours of posting to social media, the organization’s chief executive said.

In wide-ranging comments at a panel discussion at the

 Conservative Party’s annual conference

 last week, Vijay Rangarajan, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, also warned of persistent hacking and phishing attacks against the regulator and said it had detected signs of “algorithmic bias” — a form of electoral interference that would likely require the involvement of a social media company itself — in at least one UK election.

The Electoral Commission is the UK’s independent regulator which enforces laws on donations to political parties, political advertising, and other legislation around the administration and conduct of elections. Rangarajan, a former diplomat who served as the UK’s ambassador to Brazil, has been its CEO since 2024, but public interventions from him — outside of evidence sessions to the UK parliament — are relatively rare.

deepfake video circulated during Ireland’s 2025 presidential election

 that falsely depicted candidate Catherine Connolly announcing that the election had been called off and that she was withdrawing from the race. The video urged supporters not to vote. In reality, of course, Connolly had done no such thing, and in fact went on to 

“If that happens to the British election, that will move a significant amount of votes,” he said, adding that it was not the Electoral Commission’s role to arbitrate rival claims made by candidates during the cut and thrust of a campaign, but rather to focus on statements such as this one that could undermine the administration of the election itself.

To address that risk, the commission conducted a pilot program during the UK’s local elections in May 2026, Rangarajan said. “We ran a full pilot, analyzed about three million posts through an AI,” he explained. “So, this is a good example of how AI can work: 147 bits of content were flagged. Humans then looked at those — not a terribly pleasant job in some cases — ten were really quite misleading, and we referred to the social media companies or to the police.”

Rangarajan stressed these posts “didn’t really have a giant effect at this point,” but added: “the fundamental point is we now at least have a system in place to be able to help voters, and help the media, and help parties cope with what I think is an absolutely certain attempt to use some of these deepfakes against the UK.”

Taking action to find the perpetrators of such deepfakes, and to bring them to justice where possible, was something the public were keen to see, he noted, but typically would be the work of weeks or months even where it was possible — meaning it would usually happen only long after an election was over.

Because of that, the Commission’s approach was “perpetrator neutral,” he said, and instead focused on making candidates and parties aware of deepfake content affecting them within three hours of it being posted — “because that's the sort of time for it to go viral” — to leave them and other authorities to respond more swiftly.

The pilot showed how such a program would work in practice: an AI would analyze posts in real time and flag them to Electoral Commission staff, who would review them and notify candidates or parties of those meeting its thresholds, ideally within three hours of the content making its first appearance.

Rangarajan said the challenge reflects the difficulty of applying laws written for an earlier era to modern election campaigns. It is often said that UK authorities are left to try to manage 21st-century elections in the digital era, with 20th-century laws written for the analog ones. “We were set up originally to deal with money and people, systems like that. It's all about information now,” he said.

“We have to then sometimes simply act in this place, obviously within our legal remits, but try to understand how law which was passed in 1983 or 2000 can apply in 2026 because it's very out of date.”

Discussing this phenomenon, Rangarajan disclosed his belief that at least one social network was displaying signs of “bias” at election time, though he did not disclose which.

He described a scenario in which a platform’s algorithm changes its recommendations during an election, showing users posts from people with one political viewpoint while suppressing those with another.

If “at election time, that algorithm happens to change without any warning, and it's proposing to you some of your neighbors with a certain political point of view, and not others, it's suppressing one bunch, and it's proposing another. You will think that your neighbors have changed [their minds]. That will influence a lot of people,” he explained.

“That is algorithmic bias, which we think we have detected to some extent already in some of the social media campaigns,” he continued. “I think that one is one for which, to be honest, there is no legislative solution in the UK's toolbox at the moment for that particular set of issues.”

 have raised concerns about the prominent role X, in particular, plays in UK politics, after its owner Elon Musk openly 

embraced far-right political movements in the UK

British politicians have expressed concerns

 over the continued Chinese ownership of TikTok’s operations outside the United States.

In response to a question from Tech Policy Press on attacks against organizations trying to protect or maintain trust in elections or other democratic processes, Rangarajan disclosed the pace of attacks faced by the Commission, before suggesting his organization was unlikely to be the best one to tackle such threats.

"We run about [...] 30 to 40,000 attacks a month, often peaking at 10,000 a day at times. That's cyber-attacks, big botnets, thousands of emails, phishing attacks, all around,” he said.

"I would very much like to see a much more sovereign capability doing this. It's not obvious that the Electoral Commission is the place to do major social media monitoring. I think others could do it better, as long as that is indeed usable by us and spread more broadly.”

The Electoral Commission’s role, he said, is to enforce the UK laws as they exist, and to issue guidance to candidates and parties on how to follow them — but it is also empowered to make recommendations on those laws and how they should be modernized, in the hope that MPs act upon them.

In context, and cumulatively, Rangarajan’s remarks contribute to a clear request for UK elections to operate under modernized rules and perhaps even the creation of new offenses — even if at least some of those should not necessarily fall under the Electoral Commission’s remit.

Unlike the USA’s fixed election cycle, UK parliamentary elections can be called at short notice — the next general election has to happen by August 2029, but it could happen much sooner, should the prime minister wish it. Whether UK legislators can respond to the challenges Rangarajan sets out, then, remains a very open question.

In September, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Barranquilla, Colombia, to meet with President Abelardo de la Espriella and to sign memorandums of understanding on critical minerals and nuclear cooperation. The visit was part of the Secretary of State's 

 and marked the highest-level official US visit to Colombia in years, following a period in which bilateral relations had stalled amid repeated tensions between former Colombian President Gustavo Petro and US President Donald Trump.

 and the US on four critical minerals: rare earth elements, lithium, copper and tungsten. It includes exploration, processing and trade, as well as cooperation on geological surveys and the incorporation of environmental, social and governance standards. The memorandum is non-binding, and 

according to Colombia’s Foreign Ministry

, it creates no legal obligations, grants no mining rights over specific deposits and explicitly recognizes Colombia's sovereignty over its natural resources. Any projects that eventually emerge from the agreement will remain subject to the procedures and approvals required under Colombian law.

According to the State Department, the memorandum states that within six months of its signature, the two countries will begin identifying potential projects and exploring financing mechanisms. These could include guarantees, loans, equity investments and government purchase agreements. Its figures on the concentration of global supply chains are 

. Based on data from the US Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency compiled by SunSirs Commodity Group, China produced 67,000 of the world's 85,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2025, nearly 80 percent of global production. It also accounts for approximately 60 percent of global rare earth extraction and nearly 90 percent of separation and refining. Chinese smelting and processing of rare earths represents 94 percent of the global total, while its share of global copper smelting stands at 47 percent.

A history of Colombia US cooperation and its benefits

The memorandum could be good news for Colombia. Rather than viewing bilateral cooperation through a simplistic model in which the Global North benefits while the Global South merely bears the costs, it is important to recognize that cooperation with the United States has historically contributed to Colombia's economic and institutional development.

International cooperation has played an important role in Colombia's modernization. As Luis Guillermo Vélez Cabrera 

 when discussing the opportunities that opened for the coffee and railway sectors, international engagement has been central to Colombia's development. From the modernization efforts associated with the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s to the institutional and security cooperation strengthened through Plan Colombia at the beginning of this century, the relationship with Washington has been an important pillar of Colombia’s national development.

The challenge now is to ensure that this new phase of cooperation creates more than an export economy based on critical minerals. The success of this new bilateral cooperation will depend on whether Colombia can avoid repeating the environmental and social costs associated with past extractive models. The country's 

 with large-scale coal mining in La Guajira and Cesar offers a difficult precedent. Intensive extraction has affected local communities, altered watersheds and generated serious environmental and public health concerns without always translating into structural development or equitable distribution of benefits.

The hidden material costs of the AI economy

To understand the significance of the memorandum, we need to look beyond AI software, algorithms and generative models, and toward the physical infrastructure that makes them possible. AI is not immaterial. It depends on massive data centers, large amounts of energy and global supply chains for critical minerals such as rare earth elements, copper and lithium.

At the same time, Colombia should take advantage of the opportunities created by the emerging technological economy. The objective should be to establish environmental and social safeguards from the beginning, rather than treating them as obstacles to development.

A regional example illustrates why this matters. When Google launched its first Latin American data center in Quilicura, Chile, the facility brought over 

, improved regional connectivity, and catalyzed 

. However, when Google proposed a second data center in Cerrillos, its planned groundwater consumption sparked strong 

 to an air-cooled system, a landmark February 2024 ruling by Santiago's Second Environmental Court 

 the project’s permit, requiring a full reassessment of aquifer impacts. Google 

 the original proposal to submit a fully air-cooled design. More recently, community groups 

, demanding that it be subject to a full environmental review. This Chilean experience shows that technological infrastructure can adapt to local ecological limits, setting a vital regional precedent for Colombia as it seeks to attract tech development while enforcing safeguards from the outset.

The lessons from Chile suggest that Colombia's cooperation with the US should not be limited to extracting and exporting critical minerals. It should also generate knowledge transfer, domestic value chains and higher value added production, while respecting the rights of local communities. If Colombia is to become part of the technological economy built around these resources, it should seek to capture more of the value that its minerals make possible.

An opportunity for science and industry in Colombia

Colombia should approach this new phase of cooperation with the US from a position of confidence, not suspicion. American cooperation has been invaluable to the country’s institutional, economic and security development, and this memorandum could open a new chapter in that relationship. But Colombia also has decades of experience with extractive industries whose environmental and social costs offer lessons that should not be repeated as the technological economy expands.

Projects developed under this framework will have to comply with Colombian environmental law and respect the rights of affected communities. In Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories, that 

includes the constitutional protections surrounding prior consultation

. These safeguards should not be treated as obstacles to investment, but as part of the institutional framework needed to make development legitimate and sustainable.

The larger challenge, however, is economic. Colombia has too often participated in global commodity chains primarily as a supplier of raw materials, capturing only a fraction of the value generated further downstream. This memorandum offers an opportunity to change that pattern. Cooperation with the US should bring not only investment and access to markets, but also scientific knowledge, technology transfer, industrial capabilities and opportunities to develop higher-value activities within Colombia.

If critical minerals are among the foundations of the AI economy, Colombia should aspire to contribute more than the resources beneath its soil. It should seek the knowledge and capabilities needed to participate in the industries those resources make possible. Chile has demonstrated how a country with abundant mineral resources can become a major player in global supply chains, and Colombia has no reason to assume that it must remain behind. Its potential, including significant deposits of copper, nickel, rare earth elements and other strategic minerals, combined with its geographic position and industrial base, gives it the opportunity to develop a meaningful role in the emerging technological economy.

The real opportunity is for Colombia to use these resources to build knowledge, industry and technology at home. If it gets this right, the country can become part of the industries that are shaping the AI economy, rather than simply supplying the materials they depend on.

Mounir Ibrahim is chief communications officer and head of public affairs for Truepic and a former Foreign Service officer with the United States Department of State.

emerging technology used to authenticate images

 could help hold war criminals like Bashar al-Assad, then president of Syria, accountable. As a United States diplomat on the ground in Syria, I saw why verifying the authenticity of images mattered: people making consequential decisions needed evidence grounded in reality. 

Nearly a decade later, it is clear that AI is playing a growing role in decisions once made solely by humans. Whether we like it or not, we are living in a world in which AI systems make, or significantly influence, decisions ranging from drone strikes in a war zone to insurance claims about a car accident. Many of those decisions depend on visual evidence.

Helen of Troy showed us that a face could launch a thousand ships. Today, I worry the person behind the face may not exist at all.

Decisions of consequence must be grounded in reality. We cannot accept a “garbage in, garbage out” approach to AI decisioning. Such systems need to operate on authentic and verifiable visuals. Otherwise, we risk scaling fraud and chaos without any tether back to reality.

A growing number of companies — including Truepic — are making image authentication technology available across smartphones, digital cameras, software, and editing platforms, with an 

 supporting interoperability. Authentication is not a silver bullet, but when built into the capture process, it verifies origin, critical metadata and whether an image has been altered, giving AI a firmer basis for judgment. Though it will take time for authenticity to be ubiquitous, we need to start discussing why AI must run on authentic visual inputs.

Let's start with digitization of processes that were once human-run. This space is where visual fraud, deception and miscalculation live. Automation systems need to confidently identify authentic visuals if businesses and even governments are to rely on them. This is not the case today.

Meanwhile, bad actors leverage easy access to hyper-realistic visual creation and flood the very systems that need authenticity with deception. Highlighting this dynamic, a technologist, Nikita Bier, recently shared 

 post instructing an AI agent to conduct widespread return fraud against hundreds of companies with a single prompt. This fraud is happening today.

, where a Verisk report found that 98% of insurers agree that AI-powered editing tools are fueling a rise in digital media fraud. In the same report, 99% of insurers encountered manipulated or AI-altered documentation, yet only 32% feel very confident in detecting deepfakes. Similar flags are being raised across 

 and even OpenAI’s own Sam Altman warned of the coming 

Governments are raising alarm bells too. The government of South Korea just 

 that AI is driving increased fraud, particularly in insurance. In the US, a 

 from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) began inquiring about the presence of “altered, fabricated, or artificially generated images,” which can undermine governmental efforts to remove hazardous products from circulation.

Despite these warning signs, AI deployments in critical systems and services are increasingly being used for decision-making. 

 that by 2028, 32% of organizations expect to use AI to support decisions, and 27% expect AI to make decisions primarily without human intervention. Agentic capabilities will likely fuel the autonomous nature of business with less human oversight in the loop. McKinsey's 

 found that the largest organizations have scaled use of agentic AI from 27% to 40% in less than one year.

Some may suggest that AI will be smart enough to identify visual deception, but I remain skeptical. Interoperable markers, like C2PA content credentials, are now being applied to some AI outputs as companies work to respond to transparency requirements under laws like the 

 Bad actors, however, can use models that leave no such signals, or strip out safeguards entirely with free tools such as “Heretic,” whose “decensored” models have been downloaded 

. Further, so-called ‘cheapfakes’ — basic non-AI image edits, time, date or location changes — remain a major problem that AI cannot reliably detect. If AI is going to play a greater role in consequential decisions, maintaining an auditable and verifiable connection to reality should become a basic condition of its deployment.

As we move toward AI-driven decision-making, companies, industries, and governments setting the rules must ensure the evidence informing those decisions is verifiably authentic.

This is not hypothetical. The technologies described already exist on consumer devices and software platforms used by businesses and governments today. The next step is to ensure authenticated inputs for all decisions of consequence, especially when AI is the decider.

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