I wouldn't attribute an eventual Lula defeat to this, however.
His 3rd term was terrible, dozens of new taxes were implemented, living costs rose, purchasing power declined, and it became obvious that he was governing through the supreme court. His campaign was overconfident and taken completely off guard when they got utterly eviscerated in the 1st round of elections earlier this month. Left wing desperation was palpable.
Partidarian judges and journalists did everything they could to help Lula, but after the presidential debates on live television, it's pretty much over. There's just no way this guy is even fit to lead the nation ever again.
I'd just like to note: this article has 107 comments, of which you've posted 29, all in support of Bolsonaro and using the same rhetorical tactics as Trump supporters keep using.
I'm always active in threads about Brazil. I've been commenting on Brazilian politics here on HN for years now. You can look my comments up if you want.
For the record, I don't like Bolsonaro very much precisely because he's too aligned with Trump. It's unfortunate, but there is no right wing in Brazil without Bolsonaro right now. He's currently the only person who can get Lula out.
The only politician that truly represents me is the late Dr. Enéas Carneiro. He advocated for a strong interventionist and protectionist state, national industry and development, and nuclear weapons. He's the complete opposite of Bolsonaro.
You'll also often see me speak out against the numerous abuses of the Brazilian supreme court, which I have been tracking for years. My position is that they have silently usurped all power in the nation since at least 2019, and that they engaged in outright criminal conduct in the 2022 election in order to get Lula elected. There's a good chance they'll finally be impeached next year.
I have no idea what you mean by "Trump supporter tactics". I don't really socialize with MAGA people or debate American politics. I'm just trying to honestly express what I think here. English language provides a good filter for intelligent discourse compared to the average Brazilian forum.
> [Auto-Translated] The Sleeping Giants Brazil report analyzes 300 Reels of 30 Instagram profiles to investigate evidence of algorithmic favoring to federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG). Its ten videos totaled 410.5 million views, nearly three times the total of the 90 videos of the other nine MPs analyzed. In views by follower, its performance was 17.2 times the typical value of these deputies, 29.3 times that of the largest Brazilian profiles and 33.7 times that of the largest profiles in the world. His average viewing was behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, surpassing celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. The study documents a persistent disparity that requires more transparency from the Meta, although public data does not allow it to determine its causes.
Both sides are pulling record levels of engagement. It's a colosseum out there. But yes, one of the sides is more automated as usual. Most of the left engagement is human driven.
Looks at least partially organic to me, the guy is very cute and looking at his youtube video it is full of female commenters and has 2.7m subscribers.
So he is a celebrity and not just a politician, probably a lot of women are in love with him.
Facebook has also made content decisions that have hurt right wing interests in the past, such as in 2020 when they banned several accounts affiliated with Bolsonaro
To clarify, this was the nicest thing I could have said about Mark that wouldn't get my comment flagged. I have no confidence that any of these people will be held accountable by a Democratic majority.
At a certain point the big social media companies are going to have to publish their algorithms and/or let you choose your own re: friends updates, friends of friends, things your friends or friends of friends liked, etc. Make your algorithm too opaque and you run the risk of outrage engagement showing up as "the platform pushed this" whatwver that happens to be.
Well traditional publishers are responsible for the content of what shows up in their medium. Nobody would argue that the NYT shouldn't be responsible for what op-eds they publish.
New media outlets/websites do have a carve-out in the law to not be responsible for what people post there, presumably because "they (the platform) don't really have control over what people post" which is largely true.
But it's only largely true as long as new media outlet/platform isn't doing editorial work ala deciding which op-eds to show everyone and which ones to bury. But, their algorithms are de-facto editorial policy.
When you only saw updates from your friends or friends-of-friends or whatever there was no editorial policy because THEY didn't decide what you saw, YOU did. YOU were in charge of what you saw by who you associated with. The algorithm was a 1:1 correlation between your friends and what you saw.
That is no longer the case. My Facebook feed is at least 70% not updates from my friends but rather random crap that FB decides to show me. That's much closer to NYT deciding which articles/op-eds to put into the paper than it is running some kind of "people post what they want and find what they want" thing like the forums of the old days were.
Will a new law get written? I don't know. Will the tech companies allow you algorithmic choice to try and avoid getting regulated? I don't know. But there's a lot of latent discontent around how corrosive social media is by constantly stoking outrage/anger/whatever. I don't think it would necessarily be good if they got regulated but to me it's absolutely believable that it could happen.
The US government is not a fan of other sovereign nations (even Western-aligned ones) from gaining "algorithmic sovereignty", as was seen when Australia tried to do so recently and received a stern threat from the US State Department.
I would go further and make them liable for what they show. Sure it's user created content. But the feed is entirely curated by them. They decide what to show and what not and they should be liable as such.
No, it's the lawnmower analogy again: Zuckerberg has no political views, he just thinks that Trump will restrict him less/allow him to make more money/is easier to exploit.
Yes, yes. The famous leftist Jair Bolsonaro, preceeded by the communist Michel Temer in that period attest to your moronic view of recent history.
Also, would be very good to take notice that through most times while the "leftist" government was in power it had to deal with a reactionary congress.
I think it's more that they happen to be aligned. Left-wing parties are more likely to tax and regulate Meta than radical right parties. So it's for their own profit. But Trump is also mostly there for enriching the oligarchy, he often has the same priorities.
I only use FB occasionally for marketplace with an empty account. All that it's ever suggesting in the home feed is hateful, right-wing content. Never anything positive. It's so sad that that's what drives the metrics these people care about. If this is your job, shame on you!
It is somewhat confusing to me that more countries don't treat Meta as a political threat. China's approach to restricting access to western internet companies looks more and more reasonable in hindsight. The US tech giants appear to be politically active and becoming more and more willing to influence elections. I don't like the strategic situation of any anti-US political parties with Facebook in the mix (not a comment on Lula, about whos policies I know little).
That being said, it is a complex issue. There are countries that refuse to embrace US style free speech and so there is a natural pressure to move political speech to US-controlled media platforms as a result. The average quality of the chatter is higher.
Everything in the attention economy is. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. They are paired with some genuine uses like sharing knowledge or connecting with distant friends/family but ultimately the main engine in them is to steal attention and that will always be their most prominent effect on society.
I mean, there are plenty of social media mind viruses. But Zuck and Sheryl exhibit especially naked intent to get in bed with any dictator who will let them in, at the drop of a hat. The only metric they care about is growth. If burning America to the ground improved their numbers they would do it.
Don't be fooled. Whatever it is that Meta is doing, it's only a fraction of what Lula, his party and his supreme court ministers did to the Brazilian right wing. Censorship was the least of it.
I'm not even denying that it's happening. I'm just saying I don't care.
There is a lot of money involved in getting Bolsonaro back in power:
> Brazil’s government announced Friday that annual deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988 [. . .] During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60% [0]
This highlights the greatest difference between these two candidates (imo), one wants to preserve the 'lungs of the Earth', the other wants to rip them out for profit and give the world a middle finger on their way out.
Seems like a false dichotomy, don't see how sacrificing jungle would get Brazil a top-tier semiconductor industry.
And I guess the native peoples living in the Amazon are not university leftists.
I'm not into Brazilian politics, the little I know seems to indicate that it's a choice between a rock and a hard place (both seem to have corruption allegations). The objective aspect I can judge is whom Trump strongly supports. US influence in South America is a pretty bloody chapter in history.
Because the rain in most of Brazil depend on the Amazon. If the forest is gone, we will have desertification in the most populous regions of Brazil. The southeast is already facing droughts periodically, and it will get worse with more deforestation. With less rain we will produce less food, which means not only that food will become more expensive in Brazil (and a lot of people will face hunger), but we also depend on the agricultural output to avoid a trade deficit. Less rain means less food exports which means less dollars getting into Brazil, which will, among other things, turn Brazil into a hotter Argentine.
No seriously. There's a flying river, kilometers high in the sky, that goes from the Amazon to various Brazilian regions. It transports more water than the Amazon river itself (which is already the river with the highest discharge of the world). The water source is transpiration from Amazonian trees. Without the trees, the flying river is gone
I'm all for industrializing Brazil, I'm not defending the current economic model. I'm just describing the Brazilian economy the way it is.
Also, it's not really possible to industrialize the country by destroying the Amazon. There is no button that turns the forest into a top tier semiconductor industry or anything like that, that's pure fantasy. And the people destroying the forest now is doing this to raise cattle to export meat, exactly the thing you are criticizing.
The only thing that destroying the forest will accomplish is to make Brazil inhospitable, desertified, unable to support its huge population. That's not climate nonsense like you say in another comment.
It's a hollow complaint given the countless abuses of Lula, his party and all the left wingers in the judiciary and media.
Back in 2022, Bolsonaro was barred from even going live on social media while at the Palácio da Alvorada. Lula has no such restrictions and did it multiple times. Even now, we've got judges who have openly declared that they vote for Lula absolving him of the same actions they condemned Bolsonaro for in 2022.
Whatever Meta is doing, it's literally nothing compared to what they did to the Brazilian right wing. Can't say I feel sorry for them.
"Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false"
Weird how it keeps happening (e.g. just last week, Instagram and the No Kings account), and it's always to the benefit of right-wing extremists. I'm sure it's just an accident, though, surely they wouldn't lie on the internet.
If anything, many in Brazil feel a social media decline or stagnation. Orkut was poised to restart here and was met with great anticipation. Good market to new novel social media ideas.
Somehow something like Baidu web doesn’t seem too bad now. Brazil could use some sovereign tech.
The American propaganda platforms (especially Meta and X) have been weaponised to interfere in foreign elections for a long time. Brazil is just the latest example from South America. It is also happening in Europe. It is a stated goal of the Trump regime to change European governments which are not aligned with Trumpism.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/donald...
I do believe the US interference in flipping most of latin america to the right the last few years reached levels we haven't seen in decades and the magnitude of the machinery behind that is something we have never seen before. Trump surely got quite a few puppet governments with the likes of Milei, Noboa, here with the incredibly corrupt de la espriella and now Brazil in the verge to have another Bolsonaro.
Brazilian left isn't much better. It's essentially a branch of the US democratic party. Nothing but minorities, progressive nonsense. Harmless stuff for the leftists to debate. The stuff that actually hurts the bottom line of capitalists? That's off limits. Bankers are raking in record profits under Lula.
After the left got eviscerated earlier this month in the 1st round of elections, some Brazilians went to the Chinese embassy and begged for foreign intervention. This sparked something of a cultural exchange on X when actual Chinese people showed up and started debating politics with them. The tentative alliance broke down the second Brazilian leftists started defending drugs and LGBT. What about the common worker's needs? Nothing.
84 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread[1] - https://www.instagram.com/reel/De2BfVRD30o
[2] - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/16/meta-employees-...
His 3rd term was terrible, dozens of new taxes were implemented, living costs rose, purchasing power declined, and it became obvious that he was governing through the supreme court. His campaign was overconfident and taken completely off guard when they got utterly eviscerated in the 1st round of elections earlier this month. Left wing desperation was palpable.
Partidarian judges and journalists did everything they could to help Lula, but after the presidential debates on live television, it's pretty much over. There's just no way this guy is even fit to lead the nation ever again.
I guess Brazil is about to experience a shit-show similar to what the US is going through now, then. Not much hope left anywhere.
For the record, I don't like Bolsonaro very much precisely because he's too aligned with Trump. It's unfortunate, but there is no right wing in Brazil without Bolsonaro right now. He's currently the only person who can get Lula out.
The only politician that truly represents me is the late Dr. Enéas Carneiro. He advocated for a strong interventionist and protectionist state, national industry and development, and nuclear weapons. He's the complete opposite of Bolsonaro.
You'll also often see me speak out against the numerous abuses of the Brazilian supreme court, which I have been tracking for years. My position is that they have silently usurped all power in the nation since at least 2019, and that they engaged in outright criminal conduct in the 2022 election in order to get Lula elected. There's a good chance they'll finally be impeached next year.
I have no idea what you mean by "Trump supporter tactics". I don't really socialize with MAGA people or debate American politics. I'm just trying to honestly express what I think here. English language provides a good filter for intelligent discourse compared to the average Brazilian forum.
> don't editorialize.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://sleepinggiantsbrasil.com/biblioteca/visualizacoes-de... (portuguese)
> [Auto-Translated] The Sleeping Giants Brazil report analyzes 300 Reels of 30 Instagram profiles to investigate evidence of algorithmic favoring to federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG). Its ten videos totaled 410.5 million views, nearly three times the total of the 90 videos of the other nine MPs analyzed. In views by follower, its performance was 17.2 times the typical value of these deputies, 29.3 times that of the largest Brazilian profiles and 33.7 times that of the largest profiles in the world. His average viewing was behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, surpassing celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. The study documents a persistent disparity that requires more transparency from the Meta, although public data does not allow it to determine its causes.
So he is a celebrity and not just a politician, probably a lot of women are in love with him.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/facebook-suspends-disi...
> We have defeated Bolsonarism!
Luís Roberto Barroso, former Brazilian Supreme Court Justice.
New media outlets/websites do have a carve-out in the law to not be responsible for what people post there, presumably because "they (the platform) don't really have control over what people post" which is largely true.
But it's only largely true as long as new media outlet/platform isn't doing editorial work ala deciding which op-eds to show everyone and which ones to bury. But, their algorithms are de-facto editorial policy.
When you only saw updates from your friends or friends-of-friends or whatever there was no editorial policy because THEY didn't decide what you saw, YOU did. YOU were in charge of what you saw by who you associated with. The algorithm was a 1:1 correlation between your friends and what you saw.
That is no longer the case. My Facebook feed is at least 70% not updates from my friends but rather random crap that FB decides to show me. That's much closer to NYT deciding which articles/op-eds to put into the paper than it is running some kind of "people post what they want and find what they want" thing like the forums of the old days were.
Will a new law get written? I don't know. Will the tech companies allow you algorithmic choice to try and avoid getting regulated? I don't know. But there's a lot of latent discontent around how corrosive social media is by constantly stoking outrage/anger/whatever. I don't think it would necessarily be good if they got regulated but to me it's absolutely believable that it could happen.
I'd like to see something like ATProtocol feeds forced upon these companies, anyone can create any kind of feed, it works in all clients.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310291
They set the standard in transparency.
Like is the motivation to please Trump and ask for stuff/be left alone? Or is Zuckerberg really gone full right wing globally?
If the Brazilian right wins, then it will mean that not a single left wing party has won an election in South America since the end of USAID.
Historically, it is one of the main reasons why South America is the hellscape it is.
And, by the looks of it, it will keep being a hellscape.
Right wing victory might not be unheard of, but it's definitely been a while.
Also, would be very good to take notice that through most times while the "leftist" government was in power it had to deal with a reactionary congress.
That being said, it is a complex issue. There are countries that refuse to embrace US style free speech and so there is a natural pressure to move political speech to US-controlled media platforms as a result. The average quality of the chatter is higher.
Lobbying and bribes aren't confusing
If you did (or do read at some point) the final 10-15 chapters detail exactly why Facebook/Meta should be treated as a threat.
Appear ? They are the arms of the CIA.
Exciting times
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237485
I'm not even denying that it's happening. I'm just saying I don't care.
> Brazil’s government announced Friday that annual deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988 [. . .] During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60% [0]
This highlights the greatest difference between these two candidates (imo), one wants to preserve the 'lungs of the Earth', the other wants to rip them out for profit and give the world a middle finger on their way out.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/brazil-amazon-deforestation-lula-...
80% chance Bolsonaro wins.
Polymarket: Hold my beer.
As of writing, 0.2% of districts have been counted with Lula leading.
why would they care about the amazon if they barely have any money?
climate pov is a first world luxury. no one serious about this election would even attempt to make.
Only university leftists care about the Amazon to the point they sacrifice national interests for it. Completely disconnected from reality.
> Europe is not worried about the trees in the Amazon, they want the subsoil.
Dr. Enéas Carneiro.
It's all about the rare earths.
And I guess the native peoples living in the Amazon are not university leftists.
I'm not into Brazilian politics, the little I know seems to indicate that it's a choice between a rock and a hard place (both seem to have corruption allegations). The objective aspect I can judge is whom Trump strongly supports. US influence in South America is a pretty bloody chapter in history.
US 122.1
Brazil 104.6
France 80.3
Germany 70.7
World average 45.1
Rainforests are being cut down to feed cattle so people can eat beef multiple times per day. It has nothing to do with not being able to afford food.
https://piaui.uol.com.br/web/six-conclusions-about-model-of-...
No seriously. There's a flying river, kilometers high in the sky, that goes from the Amazon to various Brazilian regions. It transports more water than the Amazon river itself (which is already the river with the highest discharge of the world). The water source is transpiration from Amazonian trees. Without the trees, the flying river is gone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_river
Why not industrialize instead of exporting soy and meat until the end of time?
Also, it's not really possible to industrialize the country by destroying the Amazon. There is no button that turns the forest into a top tier semiconductor industry or anything like that, that's pure fantasy. And the people destroying the forest now is doing this to raise cattle to export meat, exactly the thing you are criticizing.
The only thing that destroying the forest will accomplish is to make Brazil inhospitable, desertified, unable to support its huge population. That's not climate nonsense like you say in another comment.
Are you one of the guys that support the pedophile Trump and believe everything he says to he gospel?
Back in 2022, Bolsonaro was barred from even going live on social media while at the Palácio da Alvorada. Lula has no such restrictions and did it multiple times. Even now, we've got judges who have openly declared that they vote for Lula absolving him of the same actions they condemned Bolsonaro for in 2022.
Whatever Meta is doing, it's literally nothing compared to what they did to the Brazilian right wing. Can't say I feel sorry for them.
Weird how it keeps happening (e.g. just last week, Instagram and the No Kings account), and it's always to the benefit of right-wing extremists. I'm sure it's just an accident, though, surely they wouldn't lie on the internet.
https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/23/meta-suspends-dozens-dutch-lgb...
It's time countries started suspending Facebook/Instagram for meddling in national affairs.
Somehow something like Baidu web doesn’t seem too bad now. Brazil could use some sovereign tech.
After the left got eviscerated earlier this month in the 1st round of elections, some Brazilians went to the Chinese embassy and begged for foreign intervention. This sparked something of a cultural exchange on X when actual Chinese people showed up and started debating politics with them. The tentative alliance broke down the second Brazilian leftists started defending drugs and LGBT. What about the common worker's needs? Nothing.
It was very educational for me.