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Meta has spent the last year handing more of its content moderation to artificial intelligence. In the last few weeks, Facebook and Instagram\u2019s parent company has fended off election-interference accusations in Brazil and the U.S. It has largely blamed these errors on its automated systems.<\/p>\n
Those accusations have come from a sitting president, a national protest movement and a U.S. Senate candidate. Each landed as Meta, a Fortune 500 company that reported $201 billion in revenue last year, speeds up a shift from human reviewers to large language models.<\/p>\n
Meta announced in March that it would roll out more advanced AI content-enforcement systems. 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; some employees have warned that the shift is happening too fast with too little oversight.<\/p>\n
In 2018, ahead of elections in Brazil and the U.S., Facebook set up a \u201cwar room\u201d of more than two dozen experts to fight election interference. Eight years later, both countries are voting again, and Meta now calls its war room the Election Operations Center. But more of the work of policing its platforms has shifted from people to software.<\/p>\n
According to an October report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization, platforms are increasingly relying on \u201ccrowdsourced and automated systems\u201d rather than human oversight. The report found that platforms have disclosed little about how these systems work or are tested, and said: \u201crelying on them as the primary means of oversight during a fast-moving election cycle remains an untested proposition.\u201d<\/p>\n
This fall\u2019s cases show what happens when those systems misfire in the middle of an election, and why Meta\u2019s explanations have satisfied few affected people.<\/p>\n
Meta did not respond to Fortune\u2018s request for comment.<\/p>\n
How Meta ended up in Brazil\u2019s electoral court<\/p>\n
Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in an Oct. 25 runoff despite what his campaign said were Meta\u2019s efforts to restrict his online reach. Meta blamed technical errors.<\/p>\n
Lula\u2019s campaign went to Brazil\u2019s Superior Electoral Court on Oct. 10, accusing Meta of favoring opponent Fl\u00e1vio Bolsonaro through biased algorithms and AI restrictions. In that petition and later filings, the campaign cited cases in which Meta\u2019s automatic translation rendered comments such as \u201cFl\u00e1vio futuro presidi\u00e1rio!!\u201d (\u201cFl\u00e1vio, future prisoner!!\u201d) as \u201cFl\u00e1vio future president!!\u201d and alleged that Meta restricted sharing for some of Lula\u2019s posts.<\/p>\n
The newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that Meta staff acknowledged in internal messages that Lula\u2019s accounts were restricted compared with Bolsonaro\u2019s.<\/p>\n
On Oct. 15, the court ordered Meta to treat both candidates equally under threat of a daily fine of 500,000 reais, about $98,000. After finding Meta\u2019s initial response insufficient, the court on Oct. 19 gave the company 24 hours to prove it had not restricted either candidate.<\/p>\n
Meta\u2019s filing listed 17 measures, Reuters reported, including human review within two hours of any automatic restriction on the presidential campaigns\u2019 ad accounts. The company denied treating the candidates unequally and said the problems arose from technical errors. Bolsonaro\u2019s campaign later joined the case, saying it had also been treated unfairly.<\/p>\n
Brazil\u2019s electoral prosecutor\u2019s office told the court that Meta had not fully complied with the rulings, including a requirement to explain how its AI tool treats content about each candidate. It argued that errors varied by candidate, undermining Meta\u2019s explanation of technical errors.<\/p>\n
Lula won the runoff with 51.8% of valid votes. The electoral court has yet to decide whether to fine Meta, and federal prosecutors, who opened an inquiry into account takedowns on Oct. 14, filed a civil suit against Meta on Oct. 21.<\/p>\n
Why No Kings went dark at the height of its day of action<\/p>\n
On Oct. 17, during the fourth national No Kings day of action, aimed at encouraging early voting, Meta suspended the coalition\u2019s Instagram account, MS NOW reported. Organizers said the account went down at about 1:30 p.m. ET, at the height of the day\u2019s events, for about 90 minutes. Even after it became viewable again, administrators couldn\u2019t access it for several hours.<\/p>\n
The coalition also said on Threads that it had received reports that \u201c#NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted, or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meta\u2019s explanation changed overnight. That day, Meta\u2019s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, attributed the suspension to unusually high rates of posting, sharing or commenting. The next day, he wrote on X that Meta\u2019s network security systems had detected \u201cthe use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags\u201d in intense bursts, and that the company\u2019s \u201cautomated protections\u201d had wrongly taken the account offline.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error,\u201d Stone wrote. The coalition\u2019s social media team later told Ars Technica it had used Claude, Anthropic\u2019s AI model, to search keywords and hashtags to track online conversation.<\/p>\n
The coalition sent an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking whether Meta had communicated with the Trump administration about the event or the 2026 midterms. It also asked how Meta\u2019s \u201cwhitelist protocols,\u201d which protect certain high-profile accounts from automated removal, treat Trump and his allies compared with No Kings and other \u201ccivil society efforts to encourage voter participation.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an Oct. 21 reply, the coalition posted that Meta apologized again and offered a meeting with its technical experts. The coalition answered with a second letter saying the company had not given a substantive response and demanding a meeting with Meta leadership.<\/p>\n
On Oct. 22, five Democratic senators led by Chris Van Hollen of Maryland demanded Meta\u2019s records of any communications with the Trump administration about No Kings and called the company\u2019s \u201cshifting explanations\u201d alarming. On Oct. 30, the coalition said it met with senior Meta executives, but the meeting ended without substantive commitments to change Meta\u2019s practices or establish safeguards.<\/p>\n
What happened to Angie Nixon\u2019s Latino outreach page<\/p>\n
On Oct. 27, Instagram took down a Spanish-language account that Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon\u2019s campaign had created to reach Latino voters, while the campaign was posting from a get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are calling on Meta to immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal,\u201d Nixon posted on X, sharing the suspension notice Instagram had sent. The account was back online by the next morning.<\/p>\n
A Meta spokesperson told Newsweek that because the account was created only a week and a half earlier, \u201cour systems automatically and mistakenly assessed it to be impersonating the Nixon for Senate campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
The anti-Trump organizing movement 50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement, linked the suspension to the No Kings incident in an Instagram post demanding \u201ctransparency and accountability beyond technical explanations.\u201d<\/p>\n
What could force Meta to answer<\/p>\n
Meta\u2019s Oversight Board, a Meta-funded but independent body that reviews content moderation decisions, criticized \u201crecurring enforcement failures in Meta\u2019s election integrity efforts.\u201d It cited the No Kings suspension and the \u201coverenforcement\u201d of Meta\u2019s fraud policies against Lula ad accounts. The statement did not suggest either incident was politically motivated, and Meta is not bound by it.<\/p>\n
Attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia have asked Meta to explain the No Kings suspension and describe how it distinguishes \u201clegitimate political activity\u201d from \u201charmful \u2018bot\u2019 traffic.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need records explaining how this happened and whether anyone in the Trump Administration had a hand in it,\u201d Raskin said.<\/p>\n
None of these demands carries the force of law. In Brazil, the electoral court\u2019s decision on a fine and the prosecutors\u2019 suit will test whether a government can compel answers. In the U.S., that depends on today\u2019s vote: if Democrats win the House, Garcia and Raskin would be in line to chair committees with the power to subpoena answers to some of these same questions.<\/p>\n
#Meta #automation #wrongly #Kings #automating<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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