Meta announced in March that it would roll out more advanced AI content-enforcement systems, and by June large language models had replaced human reviewers for about half of review requests, with a goal of 90% or more automation for some violation categories by the end of 2026, according to the Financial Times. Meta told the paper its models make 13% fewer errors than human reviewers and catch 10% more violations, though some employees have warned the shift is happening too fast with too little oversight. An October report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said platforms have disclosed little about how such systems work or are tested, and that "relying on them as the primary means of oversight during a fast-moving election cycle remains an untested proposition."
In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in an Oct. 25 runoff despite his campaign's complaints that Meta restricted his online reach. The campaign went to the Superior Electoral Court on Oct. 10, accusing Meta of favoring opponent Flávio Bolsonaro through biased algorithms and AI restrictions, citing cases in which automatic translation rendered comments such as "Flávio futuro presidiário!!" ("Flávio, future prisoner!!") as "Flávio future president!!". The newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that Meta staff acknowledged in internal messages that Lula's accounts were restricted compared with Bolsonaro's. The court ordered Meta on Oct. 15 to treat both candidates equally under threat of a daily fine of 500,000 reais, about $98,000, and on Oct. 19 gave the company 24 hours to prove it had not restricted either candidate. Meta listed 17 measures in response, including human review within two hours of any automatic restriction on the presidential campaigns' ad accounts, and denied treating the candidates unequally. Brazil's electoral prosecutor's office told the court Meta had not fully complied. The court has yet to decide on a fine, and federal prosecutors filed a civil suit against Meta on Oct. 21.
In the United States, the No Kings coalition's Instagram account was suspended on Oct. 17, during its fourth national day of action encouraging early voting. Organizers said the account went down around 1:30 p.m. ET for about 90 minutes, and administrators could not access it for several hours. The coalition said on Threads that it had received reports that "#NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted, or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms." Meta's vice president of communications, Andy Stone, first attributed the suspension to unusually high rates of posting, sharing or commenting. The next day he wrote on X that network security systems had detected "the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags" in intense bursts, and that the company's "automated protections" had wrongly taken the account offline. "We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error," Stone wrote. The coalition's social media team told Ars Technica it had used Claude, Anthropic's AI model, to search keywords and hashtags. The coalition has since pressed Meta for answers, meeting senior executives on Oct. 30, and said the meeting ended without substantive commitments.
Days later, Instagram took down a Spanish-language account that Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon's campaign had created to reach Latino voters. “We are calling on Meta to immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal,” Nixon posted on X. The account was back online by the next morning. A Meta spokesperson told Newsweek that because the account was created only a week and a half earlier, “our systems automatically and mistakenly assessed it to be impersonating the Nixon for Senate campaign.”
Meta's Oversight Board, a Meta-funded but independent body, criticized “recurring enforcement failures in Meta's election integrity efforts,” citing the No Kings suspension and the “overenforcement” of Meta's fraud policies against Lula ad accounts, without suggesting either incident was politically motivated. Attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia have asked Meta to explain the No Kings suspension and describe how it distinguishes “legitimate political activity” from “harmful ‘bot’ traffic.” Reps. Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, requested a briefing by Nov. 9. “We need records explaining how this happened and whether anyone in the Trump Administration had a hand in it,” Raskin said. None of those demands carries the force of law. In Brazil, the electoral court's decision on a fine and the prosecutors' suit will test whether a government can compel answers; in the United States, if Democrats win the House, Garcia and Raskin would be in line to chair committees with the power to subpoena answers to some of the same questions.