Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections

SideburnsOfDoom

Armaments factory employees denounce bombs.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227639 Lula wins election after final votes tallied https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237485

brandonagr2

For those not in the loop, what are the actions that "have been programmatically made user-facing to such an obvious and biased extent"?

selectodude

Meta employees still cash checks from evil company not realizing all the interference is possible due to them showing up to work every day.

join

meddling in elections and enabling genocide, the company

matt3210

Company influences politics for shareholder value, not a surprise at all. This was just the time they got caught and I bet the other MAG7 are doing it in some form too even if its just massive donations

jacquesm

So, they all resigned?

p2detar

The situation everywhere looks dire. These aren‘t social media platforms anymore but tools for propaganda and repression against opposition groups across different countries. > 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria. > Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual. Source: https://bsky.app/profile/yurukov.yurukov.net/post/3myozobbcy...

basilgohar

A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company. The question is, if the people that actually care and push back leave: 1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents? 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future? 3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening? Which way do we want things to go? I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside? We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries. Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.

cute_boi

"We Meta employees want to build technologies and platforms that millions of people use and enjoy." We Palantir employees want to build software tools for clients to combine, clean, and make sense of their own scattered datasets

ivell

These behaviors are only short term beneficial for the company. Eventually they will just get banned in other nations as a threat to sovereignty.

drgo

Is there a competition among the tech pros for who becomes the most hated tech bro in the world?

xyst

To me this is just virtue signaling while cashing a $200K+ salary from evil corp. plus probably puts a target on your back. If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press. Climb the ladder as high as possible and infiltrate top leadership.

xlayn

I'm going to make a very bold claim here... block those 2 big ones and you will fix a lot of what's going on the planet right now.

cheriot

Is there a description of what Meta to help Flavio? The article just makes vague assertions.

lenerdenator

Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares. You have to have reforms around that first. Cambridge Analytica, the Metaverse, the New Mexico judgment... all examples of things that would have gotten any other CEO canned due to their damage to the bottom line, but Mark doesn't have to worry, because he's not going to vote himself out.

Aurornis

There are so many English articles about this topic that never explain what happened. I clicked on everything from Reuters to Al Jazeera and they're all reciting the same line about "accounts restricted". The best I could find was from some translations of paywalled Brazilian articles like this one https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/em-mensagens-int... The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day. There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts. There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally. A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject. That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.

loeg

No actual details or evidence of favoritism backing the claims.

johen8

Honestly, in 2018 Meta *allegedly* interfered in the other direction. It basically goes along with who the US President is. This discourse is just to stoke division and promote censorship and bigger government control.

worik

This will damage Meta's business. As the meme that they cannot be trusted spreads alternative methods of communication will revive, and start to flourish Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die