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Comment by cheriot | Hacker News Reader

Is there a description of what Meta to help Flavio? The article just makes vague assertions.

Aside from what other users described, some interesting “technical glitches” revealed training biases:

- Meta AI refused to generate campaign images depicting Lula, but not Bolsonaro.

- If you asked for Meta AI to generate fictitious campaign images for fake candidates, they would have Bolsonaro’s party number. It would refuse to generate images with Lula’s party number claiming it can’t use real party numbers (Brazilians vote by typing the candidate’s number in an electronic voting machine)

- AI-powered translation was refusing to translate “presidiário” correctly when referring to Jair.

If I recall, they banned Lula's account and promoted Flavio super hard in the recommendations feeds.

I don't think you recall correctly

I found that Lula's team was unable to pay to boost posts for about 24 hours, which was a bug that affected other accounts too.

Meta also changed the search algorithm to trigger account matching after 5 characters, which would make "@lulaofficial" not the top recommendation for everyone who only typed "lula".

The rumors about what happened are crazy. These things would be so easy to report in any of the news articles, but instead everyone is just guessing and sharing rumors.

It is incredible how little critical thinking is being applied on the Brazilian election. Too many are taking at face value that somehow META is responsible for something nefarious without any direct evidence and accusations.

There is enough precedence to believe that it was intentional. The book Careless People goes into details specifically describing this tactic being used a decade ago.

Meta itself has been describing the favouritism as caused by technical glitches - which for some reason always benefitted Bolsonaro. Searches for Lula on Instagram didn't show any results while searches for Bolsonaro worked. Restrictions on Lula's ad account was apparently also a technical glitch. Strangely enough, there was also some technical glitches that caused whatsapp searches for Lula's 7 million members whatsapp channel to bring up Bolsonaro's whatsapp channel instead. Did I mention that Meta was fined $25 billion dollars last week for lying and misleading the public?

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