Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election

He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...

Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.

I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.

I don't understand why countries don't simply block facebook, instagram, etc. There's zero upside to allowing them.

I would be in favor of blocking ALL political expressions on social media a few weeks before elections.

But this case is something else entirely.

A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.

No one used to care about elections in other countries, but it seems political polarization is truly globalized now. An election in one country seems to carry such heavy stakes for citizens elsewhere. Why? Transnational disinformation? Sad time.

Having worked ad review, mass flags like this are usually a dumb classifier, not a plan.

Waiting for people to realise that this is not a recent Facebook specific development.

In the same way USA is realising “holy crap all our stuff is made in China”, every non-US company is realising “holy crap, all our news and information runs through a couple of American web sites”

Yes this looks like a overly enthusiastic attempt to block disinformation during an election (a good thing, and also LuLa will be sailing close to that line if not over it)

But Brazils most famous election candidate just booked his whole campaign on Facebook. I bet he prints the flyers in Brazil, I bet he speaks on Brazilian TV and radio, appears on Brazilian podcasts, but the globalisation race means he has to use American social media.

The only response is going to be Balkanisation or ending curation by algorithm.

Interesting

Meta and Mark are the new Murdoch.

Evil always finds new acolytes.

Calculated & orchestrated I believe.

They never said "Don't do evil".

Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".

If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.

Anyone familiar, to comment?

There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"

There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.

Last time I looked, Lula was favored, but this time it seems he's about even with the far-right opponent, Flávio. How do you think it'll turn out?

I see most of the comments here being pretty critical of Metas intervention ... Back in 2021 though .. this post seemed to have the opposite effect ..

Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672461

its funny how the tables have turned

Here we go again

Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,and not an arm of the American state whipping up hatred, spreading misinformation, and interfering with elections?

To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.

"your account violates our terms of use, if you think that is not the case tell us why not"

Much ado about nothing:

- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.

- The account has been reestablished already

This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?

I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?

This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also you’ll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...

Disgusting. They bent over 5x backwards not to meddle in election politics for Trump (that is: in the era after they banned him for violating policies)

[dead]

Trump is pro Israel. Zuck bends over backwards to get Trump elected.

Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.

I wonder why?

are they even allowed to do that, damn

Everybody in tech should read Careless People, not just to learn details about Meta. I'm sure many of us (myself included) have worked at places where the technical challenge outweighs any concerns about the overall company's mission or effect on the world at large. In Facebook's case they have a lot of blood on their hands.