Lula points to the digital empire three days before the election
In the livestream with André Janones on October 22, 2026, the president said Meta “counts lies” and “favors some people to the detriment of democracy”, on the same day the Superior Electoral Court gave the company 24 hours to explain the “Exército do Lula” channel. A candidate’s reach has become a matter of sovereignty, and whoever audits reach is whoever operates the system.
President and reelection candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) closed the October 22, 2026 livestream with a line that needed no explanation for anyone on the other side of the screen: “Our army will now prove, in this election, that we will defeat the digital empire”. The broadcast, alongside federal congressman André Janones (Rede-MG), began at 6 p.m., Washington time, three days before the October 25, 2026 runoff.
The empire he named has no territory and no embassy. It has servers, a compliance plan signed with Brazil’s electoral judiciary, and the final word on how many people see what a candidate posts. It is that combination that turned a campaign complaint into a sovereignty dispute.
The empire he named has no territory and no embassy. It has servers, a compliance plan signed with Brazil’s electoral judiciary, and the final word on how many people see what a candidate posts.
Lula went straight to the point that matters to the campaign. He said Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, “counts lies” and “favors some people here in Brazil to the detriment of democracy”, that the company “cannot think it can fool humanity all the time” and that “it will have to conform to the good customs that humanity needs in order to live well”. On the regulation he advocates, he was explicit: “any crime on the internet must be treated as a crime in real life”, and “what we want is freedom of expression with responsibility”.
What was on the table
The accusation was not born on the livestream. Internal messages from Meta staff revealed by Folha de S.Paulo on October 16, 2026 showed that Lula’s profile had its boosting of posts restricted on Instagram for nearly 24 hours, while accounts and channels linked to his opponent were recommended by Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s algorithms, which the rules of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) prohibit. The same documents indicated that the company’s artificial intelligence blocked the creation of pieces favorable to Lula while allowing equivalent pieces about Flávio Bolsonaro (PL). The campaign took the matter to the TSE and announced it would bring the case to the Organization of American States (OAS). Meta denies political interference and attributes the episodes to technical and operational failures.
The court had reacted before the livestream. On October 16, the TSE’s full bench unanimously upheld the ruling by justice Marco Aurélio Belizze barring Meta from reducing distribution, excluding recommendations or restricting searches of the candidates’ posts, with a daily fine of R$ 500,000 in case of noncompliance. On October 22, the court’s president, Kassio Nunes Marques, gave the company 24 hours to deliver a technical report on the “Exército do Lula” channel, at the request of Flávio’s campaign, and demanded that Google provide information on the coordinated amplification of terms and hashtags between October 18 and 20. The channel itself had been suspended on October 11, reinstated by electoral inspector justice Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva and restored by order of Nunes Marques on October 14. That same day, October 22, Lula joined the channel as an administrator; the contact was saved as “Marechal Lula da Silva”, the first message attributed to him was the word “cheguei” — “I’ve arrived” — with a squid emoji, and the campaign did not confirm whether the text came from his phone.
The jurisdiction that flies no flag
The word empire carries a useful imprecision. There is no metropolis collecting tribute from Brasília; there is a company based in California that decides, with its own engineering, how a Brazilian electoral rule reaches the Brazilian voter. What the campaign’s investigation describes is at once humbler and more serious: for nearly a day, the reach of a candidate for reelection sat below that of his opponent, and the fix came through a court decision, with a deadline and a fine.
The asymmetry lies in the instruments. The TSE has a pen, a 24-hour deadline and a fine of R$ 500,000 per day; the company has an incident log, the prerogative to classify what counts as a failure, and the technical time of whoever operates the system. When the two parties dispute the same fact, whoever audits the fact is whoever holds the server. The report ordered on October 22 asks for exactly that: the criteria that separate “legitimate mobilization” from “potentially irregular coordinated behavior”.
The second element of the empire appears on the ballot. Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro presented digital plans that compete over the same terrain in opposite directions. The president’s plan calls for sovereign computing infrastructure, with supercomputers and research at public institutions, proprietary Portuguese-language language models and a national data foundation; the senator’s bets on practical applications in public services, with a virtual assistant for access to rights and the use of artificial intelligence in triage within the Unified Health System (SUS). Electing one of the two on October 25, 2026 will set the direction of the government’s digital policy.
What stands established
Whoever governs Brazil from 2027 will run the country inside an infrastructure whose reach is administered from outside it, and the first act of government on that terrain already has a known shape: a technical report with a 24-hour deadline and a daily fine of R$ 500,000. The line from October 22, 2026 records that Brazil’s most competitive campaign of 2026 needed a court order to be seen on the same footing as its opponent, and that the instrument available to the State is asking for explanations from whoever operates the system.