by Bruno Ribeiro
Facebook Serviços Online do Brasil has received more money from election campaigns in Brazil this year than any other company.
The company is a subsidiary of Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta has faced accusations from the Workers’ Party, as well as from researchers and civil society organizations, of favoring the campaign of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.
Meta is the company that has most made money off of online ads in Brazil's elections. (Photo Illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
According to numbers from the Superior Electoral Court, as of October 14, Facebook Serviços Online do Brasil had received $55.75 million from campaigns between the start of the electoral period in August.
The actual figure may be even higher. The second-largest recipient of campaign funds, the payment processor DLocal, received an additional $19.55 million for content promotion, services that are also carried out on Meta’s social media platforms. In third place, with $6.12 million, is Delta3 Comunicação, a firm owned by Raul Rabelo, who works for Lula and is a business partner of the Minister of Social Communication Secretary, Sidônio Palmeira.
Flávio, who is competing in the presidential election’s runoff against Lula, leads in payments made to Facebook. He declared 13 separate payments to the company between September 8 and September 30, totaling $1.48 million. Lula follows in second place, with $510,00.
These expenditure figures are partial.
“Content promotion” refers to a service for which Meta charges candidates to display their posts to a larger number of social media users. Candidates can target these messages toward specific audiences. The company maintains a page, the Ad Library, which provides some information about promoted content, though it lacks precise data.
Flávio, for instance, paid “between $12,000 and $14,000,” according to the Ad Library, to promote a video, which was still being boosted as of Sunday, October 11. In the video, the re-elected conservative governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, asks for votes for Flávio and offers praise.
The page indicates that 26% of the audience that saw the advertisement were men aged 25 to 44, a demographic where the senator draws a significant portion of his support, while 11% were women over the age of 65, a segment where, according to Datafolha, Lula performs better.
Meanwhile, the Workers’ Party candidate paid “between $3,000 and $4,000” this week to promote a video that contrasts footage of one child holding a copy of the Constitution, with images of a child holding a gun, celebrating Flávio’s first-round victory, an incident that gained traction on social media.
In Lula’s case, 26% of the audience that received the message were also men aged 25 to 44, the same demographic where Flávio tends to perform best.
An analysis of the ten campaigns that spent the most directly with Meta shows that such expenditure does not guarantee victory. Flávio and Lula are both in the runoff. Of the other eight candidates, three were elected and five were defeated.
Former Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, who was defeated in the first round in São Paulo by Tarcísio, spent roughly the same amount as Lula, $500,000. and finished the race with 36.4% of the valid votes in the state. He ranks third in terms of direct payments made to Meta, according to the Superior Electoral Court. Tarcísio, however, spent an equivalent amount on content promotion, with these expenditures declared through DLocal.
Ciro Gomes, who ran for governor of Ceará, received 46.2% of the vote. That was not enough, however, to defeat Elmano de Freitas, from the Workers’ Party, who won in the first round.
Aécio Neves and Alexandre Curi, candidates for the Senate from Minas Gerais and Paraná, respectively, also appear in the rankings but were not elected. Aécio spent $400,000 on content promotion, while Curi spent $300,000.
Wellington Fagundes, from Flávio’s Liberal Party, paid $300,000 to Meta for his campaign in Mato Grosso, but he was surpassed by Otaviano Pivetta, from the Republicanos party, in the first round.
Federal Deputy Célio Studart, from the center-right Social Democratic Party, was re-elected in Ceará. He declared payments of $470,000 million to Facebook. He was the 13th most-voted parliamentary candidate in his state.
Lindbergh Farias, from the Workers’ Party, was the third most-voted candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in Rio de Janeiro. He declared $320,000. Carolina de Toni, from Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, won a Senate seat representing Santa Catarina. She also spent $320,000.
Meta’s algorithms are undisclosed, and there is no transparency regarding how non-promoted content is distributed.
As reported by the Folha newspaper, Lula’s campaign has accused the company of favoring Flávio by removing PT-related content without explanation.
At the time, the company denied these allegations.
The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the matter.
Another suspected irregularity, pointed out by the Internet and Social Media Studies Laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, is that the company may have run paid political advertisements from abroad, a practice prohibited by electoral legislation.
This article was originally published in ICL Noticias. It was translated by Panamerican Dispatch. You can read the original in Portuguese, here.