Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism

> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence. My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here. I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.

It's the same here. AfD content gets pushed on YT. No matter how often I ignore channels. Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.

Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions. Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.

My impression is, some Bolsonaro favoritism is real, but is it Meta’s fault or a generally-neutral algorithm (e.g. ranking based on upvotes) favoring Bolsonaro because of his supporters (or bots)? If it’s the latter, what should Facebook do? “End algorithms”? Even a firehouse of newest comment (or most upvoted as suggested) would benefit Bolsonaro if his online support outnumbers opposition. Ban both candidates from the platform, or make every search show them both? That will probably not work; confuse Brazilian citizens why their politicians are being censored (which will influence them because their politician is being attacked by Lula’s court, or even Facebook acknowledges their opponent politician is dangerous); and not end the lawsuits if they continue bringing “evidence” like Meta AI randomly generating Bolsonaro-related numbers. The most egregious evidence against Meta are suspending Lula’s official accounts. This can also be attributed to a neutral system processing opponents’ mass reports, but has an obvious solution: give every official account immunity from suspension except by the highest level admins, because they’re supposed to only be suspected according to guidelines, and a $trillion company has enough resources to closely monitor high-level official accounts.

I think there is a case for making - personalized ads - election ads by law strictly two different things. The risk of voter manipulation is just way to high. This also isn't just about manipulation by US companies, the system they created is just to ab-usable by others, too. To make it worse the more ethical values a person has/upright and honest they are the less likely are to use such means but the more likely they would make a good elected politician for the general population. At the same time humans are just way too easy to manipulate. (Naturally there is also a case for _any_ personalized ads being a high risk for societies, especially democracies, and in turn the concept if it should be banned. Important here is to note that often just basing ads on the "non ad content" they are displayed alongside with is getting you quite far. So if there even is a need for highly personalized ads can be put in question. Through the topic gets far more complicated with highly personalized non ad content recommendation systems..)