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Imagine scrolling through your phone and seeing a familiar politician at a campaign rally, his arms raised, voice strong, standing in front of a sea of Brazilian flags. He looks real. He sounds real. What he is saying makes you feel something. Then you learn that the politician is actually in prison, and the person in the video was created entirely by artificial intelligence. That is not a science fiction scenario anymore, and it is exactly the kind of thing that Brazilian voters are dealing with as they prepare to go to the polls on October 4. This election is one of the most consequential in Brazil’s recent history, and it is happening at the intersection of two major global battles: the race to use artificial intelligence to shape democracy, and the race to control the technology itself. Thirteen candidates are running for president, but the real contest is between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, the current president, and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the right-wing Liberal Party. Lula narrowly defeated Flávio’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2022, but the elder Bolsonaro is now serving time for his role in plotting a coup to overturn that result. The atmosphere in Brazil is heavy with distrust, and there is a real possibility that a right-wing candidate closely aligned with Donald Trump could take power. What makes this even more significant is that Brazil is not just another country having an election. It is a priority market for AI companies, a growing hub for data-center investment, and a vital source of critical minerals needed to build and power AI technology. The United States, the European Union, and major corporations are all looking to Brazil to help reduce their dependence on China, and Flávio Bolsonaro has signaled he would welcome that realignment. This means whoever controls Brazil’s government will have enormous political and commercial influence, which makes the election a prime target for interference by foreign governments and technology companies with huge financial stakes in the outcome.
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Brazil has been here before, in a way. For years, the country has served as a testing ground for digital information warfare, and it has become painfully clear that the digital environment there is fertile ground for innovative strategies designed to spread polarizing content and manipulate public debate. Several factors make Brazil uniquely vulnerable to political disinformation: people rely heavily on hyperconnected chat applications like WhatsApp, political polarization is intense, and the influence-driven media market is extremely powerful. Brazilian authorities were also early to recognize the dangers of AI as an election tool. Ahead of this election, the Superior Electoral Court, known as the TSE, introduced rules that prohibit generative AI systems from recommending or prioritizing candidates, parties, or campaigns, and from expressing any electoral preference or telling people how to vote. The rules also restrict AI-generated content broadly. In theory, these regulations are meant to protect voters from misinformation, disinformation, bias, and hidden influence. In practice, they are not working as intended. Research on major AI models has found that they rank or order candidates in nearly every instance during testing, and they do not reliably use official sources when doing so. Worse, the responses are often inconsistent, changing depending on how a question is phrased. Two voters could ask the same chatbot the same question in slightly different ways and receive completely different answers, with different levels of reliability, and no one would ever know because no one outside the companies can see all of those responses. At the same time, Meta’s advertising system has been approving ads that violate both its own community standards and Brazilian election law. Corporate accountability watchdog Eko found that approved advertisements included calls for a repeat of the January 8 attempted coup in Brazil, incitement to violence against lawmakers, hate speech targeting politicians, fake claims about Trump endorsing Flávio Bolsonaro, and conspiracy theories claiming that Jair Bolsonaro is a political prisoner. These are not harmless glitches. They are signs of a system that is failing voters at the exact moment they need reliable information most.
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This has created an enormous and escalating battle between Brazilian regulators and global technology giants, and it is a battle that feels far more personal than a typical legal dispute. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court and Supreme Court have imposed some of the most aggressive anti-disinformation measures in the world, including strict bans on deepfakes and rules that hold platforms responsible for what they amplify. But this top-down approach has turned the digital environment into a proxy war over sovereignty and free speech. High-profile clashes between Brazilian authorities and tech platforms have become political weapons, with powerful actors using them to fuel anti-establishment narratives and deepen public distrust in both government and media. In 2024, after heavy lobbying from tech companies, Brazil’s Senate removed previously proposed safeguards against high-risk AI models, reportedly because of pressure from Big Tech. A year earlier, Google and Telegram were investigated for allegedly interfering with Brazil’s Fake News Bill, which was intended to hold platforms accountable for misinformation. This pattern is familiar. Just as they have embraced the Trump administration in the United States, many technology companies have forged alliances with the far right in Brazil to avoid regulation. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this conflict came when Elon Musk challenged Brazil’s Supreme Court over its attempts to block X accounts associated with disinformation networks. Musk encouraged Brazilians to defy court orders by using virtual private networks to access blocked content, which led the court to include him in an investigation into the spread of disinformation and to open a separate inquiry into his conduct. In August 2024, the court blocked X entirely in Brazil, although the platform was allowed to return two months later after complying with court orders. Musk’s confrontation gave the Bolsonaro movement a powerful international champion. At a rally in 2024, Jair Bolsonaro praised Musk as “the man who really preserves true freedom for all of us,” a statement that tapped into a broader culture war over free speech and turned Brazilian far-right supporters into foot soldiers in the fight against the courts. Then, in January 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the attacks, implying that “secret courts” in Latin America were carrying out mass censorship, a remark widely understood to target Brazil’s Supreme Court. Zuckerberg also said he wanted to work with President Trump to push back on governments that go after American companies. This is not just a legal or regulatory issue. It is a collision of ideology, money, and power, and ordinary Brazilian voters are caught in the middle.
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To understand what is happening now, it helps to remember that technology companies have shaped elections for years, both directly and indirectly. People get information through search engines, share it on social media, and are then targeted with political advertising based on detailed profiles built from their online behavior. Disinformation and misinformation have become central features of modern election campaigns, and tech companies are at the heart of both the spread of false information and the fight to control it. Brazil has been a major testing ground for these dynamics, especially during the previous two election cycles, when false claims about elections, voting, and related issues circulated widely across social media and messaging platforms. WhatsApp was a major source of concern then, and many of those concerns are still relevant today. But now the problem has grown even more complicated because AI chatbots have become primary sources of bias and false information. The danger is that chatbots operate in much the same way as WhatsApp groups did, but in a more opaque form. On WhatsApp, researchers and journalists could sometimes see what was being shared in public groups, and they could track the spread of misinformation. With AI chatbots, the delivery is private, personalized, and largely invisible. Most people have no idea where the chatbot is getting its information, how it decides what to prioritize, or why it answers the way it does. This is similar to a tactic seen in previous Brazilian elections, where political campaigns operated vast numbers of WhatsApp groups that were made to appear separate and grassroots-driven, hiding the fact that a few administrators controlled most of the groups. AI chatbots work from an even darker black box. Election observers, fact-checkers, and journalists cannot see what the chatbots are telling individual voters. No one knows exactly how much misinformation or disinformation people are being exposed to because no one even knows what information people are seeing when they access it through an AI-mediated platform. This is particularly troubling because digital platforms have repeatedly been shown to disproportionately amplify right-wing propaganda and have allowed partisan bias to influence decisions about content access. The tools are new, but the pattern is dangerously familiar, and the potential for harm is much greater.
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In the weeks ahead of the election, the danger has become even more obvious. On September 23, just eleven days before the vote, Meta temporarily prevented Lula’s campaign page from running political advertisements and removed an Instagram account that had published reporting about Flávio Bolsonaro’s alleged connections to financial scandals. Meta later reversed course, but its explanation was unclear, and the damage had already been done. This echoes what happened three years earlier, when Google used its Brazilian search homepage to direct users toward opposition to proposed platform regulation and encouraged them to lobby lawmakers. That decision, too, was defended by the company, which denied manipulating search results. More telling is the explosion of AI-generated election content. In just the first eleven days of the campaign, Brazil’s electoral court received nineteen cases involving the use of AI in political advertising and campaigning. The most striking example came in July 2026, when Flávio Bolsonaro released a campaign video featuring deepfake footage of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest. The video made it look as though the former president was out on the campaign trail with his son, even though the elder Bolsonaro is barred from making public statements or using social media. The deepfake allowed Flávio to effectively create the appearance of a formal endorsement from a still very popular political figure. Left-wing parties challenged the video, arguing that it illegally evaded restrictions imposed on Jair. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court ruled by four votes to three that the video did not count as official electoral advertising because it appeared before Flávio’s candidacy was formally registered. The court did, however, issue a broader definition of prohibited deepfakes for the rest of the campaign. Flávio also produced at least one AI-generated campaign song and shared several other AI campaign videos. At the same time, Bolsonaro supporters have organized massive digital “armies,” including a WhatsApp group where members receive daily “visual ammunition” to post on social media to boost the campaign. A companion website reportedly contains ready-made posts, allowing users to filter content by platform or category. One of the largest content categories focuses on criticism of the Workers’ Party, which is exactly what happened in previous digital campaigns led by the Bolsonaro movement. Those earlier campaigns helped incite an attempted coup several years ago, and it remains unclear whether this year’s digital armies will try to fuel another insurrection.
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What is clear, though, is that technology billionaires have a massive stake in the outcome of this election, and they have powerful tools to shape what voters see. The recent events in Brazil show that AI can put a sidelined leader back on the campaign trail, platforms can amplify a political attack or interrupt a campaign’s advertising, and opaque algorithms can quietly influence millions of minds. Whoever wins the upcoming election will help write the rules that technology companies must follow, and both sides know it. The danger is that the people trying to win power and the companies helping them reach voters see accountability as an inconvenience rather than a necessity. For the rest of us, this is a warning. Democracy depends on the ability of citizens to make informed choices, and informed choices require reliable information. When information is shaped by hidden algorithms, private chatbots, and corporate interests, voters are no longer truly choosing for themselves. They are responding to a reality that has been carefully constructed for them, and they may not even realize it. Brazil is not unique in facing this challenge, but its election is unfolding in a particularly dramatic way, and the world is watching. The outcome will not only determine whether Brazil moves toward a far-right future aligned with Trump, but also whether the global movement to regulate AI and hold tech companies accountable can survive intense pressure from billionaires and governments that benefit from the chaos. The next few weeks will be a test, not just for Brazil, but for the entire idea of trustworthy information in the age of artificial intelligence. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of these forces, but it is not hopeless. Voters, journalists, fact-checkers, and ordinary citizens who care about democracy can still demand transparency. They can ask hard questions about who is behind the content they see, why it was made, and what it is trying to make them believe. But the urgency could not be greater. If the power of AI is left in the hands of people who value winning over truth, the consequences will extend far beyond Brazil. This election is a preview of the future, and we all need to pay careful attention, because the technology that is shaping Brazil’s democracy today is being built for the rest of the world tomorrow.