A deluge of AI-generated content and unfair treatment by social media platforms could prove pivotal in Brazil’s presidential election, according to supporters of the left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Lula will face off against right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro on 25 October in the second round of the contest. Lula’s campaign has Meta – which owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – of favouring Bolsonaro by suspending Lula’s campaign advertising account, suppressing posts and blocking AI-generated content.

Brazil’s electoral prosecutors have said with court orders to ensure equal treatment of both candidates, while United Nations human rights experts possible unequal treatment of the two campaigns.

Images have widely circulated showing Meta AI, a chatbot integrated into WhatsApp, refusing to generate campaign posters for Lula, while instantly producing an image for “Flávio”.

Meta said “claims that we are favoring or interfering on behalf of any candidate or political group are false and unfounded”. It said Lula’s account was suspended for 1 hour by mistake and that its systems blocked prompts referring to the names “Lula” and “Bolsonaro”, but not the common first names Luiz or Flávio.

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Lula’s campaign remains unconvinced. It submitted screenshots to the electoral court showing Meta AI repeatedly assigning Bolsonaro’s electoral number, 22, to generic, fictional politicians and allegedly translating “Flávio futuro presidiário” (“Flávio future prisoner”) as “Flávio future president”.

Determining whether the discrepancies are deliberate is impossible because Meta’s systems are opaque, says at the University of Virginia. “But when a technical glitch tends to repeat its outcome, it’s very hard to accept that this is just a technical failure.”

Lula finished behind Bolsonaro in the first round of voting, but polls show the gap is narrowing. The comeback has been partly credited to Lula’s Army, an intensive online campaign in which 8 million WhatsApp channel subscribers receive daily tasks, such as posting photographs on Instagram posing with their fingers forming an L.

This year’s general election is Brazil’s first since large language models (LLMs) became widely popular, and it is awash with AI-generated content. Experts say Latin America’s largest democracy offers a glimpse of what is to come for AI in politics.

of AI-generated or manipulated election content ahead of the first round, primarily on Facebook and Instagram, 60 per cent of it unlabelled. found that 26 Meta advertising accounts appeared to sidestep restrictions on foreign-funded political advertising by posting AI-generated videos, including one depicting Bolsonaro and Argentina’s president Javier Milei freeing Brazil from communists.

Meta’s independent oversight board says the company’s .

“It’s very worrying,” says Nemer. “So much of our political campaign dynamics have been transferred to privatised companies that we have no idea how they operate.”

Regulating AI in political campaigns won’t be as simple as it seems, says at InternetLab, a Brazilian digital rights non-profit that studied how eight major AI chatbots respond to questions about Brazil’s election.

Its report found that chatbots sometimes refused genuine questions about candidates, referring users to official electoral websites, but would agree to draft misleading claims questioning the integrity of elections for use in campaigning.

Massaro says clearer safeguards for LLMs are needed, but first their objectives must be defined.

“Are the safeguards working? That’s one question. But working for what, because it depends on what your goals are,” she says. “Is the solution to send people away without providing any kind of information? Is this what we want?”

If the emotional rollercoaster of global politics feels overwhelming, the findings of a new study might help to explain why. Emotions evoked by political issues seem to be felt differently in the body than when the same emotions are experienced in everyday life. Understanding how and why this happens may offer clues to how we can stay calm while remaining informed and engaged citizens.

“Feeling more is probably a good thing for democracy,” says at Royal Holloway, University of London. “Feeling better is about first figuring out what you feel, and then the challenge is learning how to respond rather than react.”

Tsakiris and his colleagues asked nearly 1000 people to mark on a body-outline diagram where, and how intensely, they felt emotions including anger, disgust and hope. Then, they were asked to do the same, but while reading words associated with emotionally laden political issues, such as terrorism and crime.

Their responses were used to create a digital heat map, which covered where in the body each emotion was felt, how intensely, and whether the sensation was linked to feeling spurred into action or demotivated and detached.

Previous research suggests that many , and the patterns of activation or demotivation . Depression, for instance, almost universally shows widespread deactivation across the body, reflecting a lack of energy and motivation, while anger is felt as a high energy, activating sensation in the chest, head and arms.

The new study largely reflected these past findings, except when some emotions were evoked by politics. “People usually feel that their whole body is deactivated when they’re depressed, but politically linked depression is more mobilising”, says Tsakiris, with more intense sensations experienced throughout the torso and limbs.

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Political disgust was also felt as a higher-energy sensation across the upper body, compared to non-political disgust which clusters around the gut. When compared with non-political emotions, “political disgust more closely resembles anger”, says Tsakiris.

Why this occurs isn’t clear, but Tsakiris speculates it might be because political issues feel too big to tackle on our own, so we might feel motivated to join a wider cause to effect change. “The sense of agency that we have in politics is quite different,” he says. “We cannot probably effect a change on our own. It will be a collective effort.”

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By getting better acquainted with our emotions, we may be able to avoid getting trapped in a cycle of doom scrolling and despair, says at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK. “We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but that doesn’t consider how the body influences our decisions, behaviours and responses.”

Quadt and her colleagues have previously shown that training people to listen to their heartbeat and other bodily sensations associated with strong emotions . Getting more in tune with how we feel, “might indeed help to become less overwhelmed by negative emotions and perhaps then enable action, rather than avoidance”, she says.

President Donald Trump wants to ensure the US government only gives federal contracts to artificial intelligence developers whose systems are “free from ideological bias”. But the new requirements could allow his administration to impose its own worldview on tech companies’ AI models – and companies may face significant challenges and risks in trying to modify their models to comply.

“The suggestion that government contracts should be structured to ensure AI systems are ‘objective’ and ‘free from top-down ideological bias’ prompts the question: objective according to whom?” says at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a public policy non-profit in Washington DC.

The Trump White House’s , released on 23 July, recommends updating federal guidelines “to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias”. Trump signed a related titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” on the same day.

The AI action plan also recommends the US National Institute of Standards and Technology revise its AI risk management framework to “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change”. The Trump administration has already defunded research studying misinformation and shut down DEI initiatives, along with dismissing researchers working on the US National Climate Assessment report and cutting clean energy spending in a bill backed by the Republican-dominated Congress.

“AI systems cannot be considered ‘free from top-down bias’ if the government itself is imposing its worldview on developers and users of these systems,” says Branum. “These impossibly vague standards are ripe for abuse.”

Now AI developers holding or seeking federal contracts face the prospect of having to comply with the Trump administration’s push for AI models free from “ideological bias”. Amazon, Google and Microsoft have held federal contracts supplying AI-powered and cloud computing services to various government agencies, whereas Meta has made its  available for use by US government agencies working on defence and national security applications.

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In July 2025, the US Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Office worth up to $200 million each to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. The inclusion of xAI was notable given Musk’s recent role leading President Trump’s DOGE task force, which has fired thousands of government employees – not to mention xAI’s chatbot Grok recently making headlines for expressing racist and antisemitic views while describing itself as “MechaHitler”. None of the companies provided responses when contacted by New Scientist, but a few referred to their executives’ general statements praising Trump’s AI action plan.

It could prove difficult in any case for tech companies to ensure their AI models always align with the Trump administration’s preferred worldview, says at Bocconi University in Italy. That is because large language models – the models powering popular AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – have certain tendencies or biases instilled in them by the swathes of internet data they were originally trained on.

Some popular AI chatbots from both US and Chinese developers demonstrate surprisingly similar views that align more with US liberal voter stances on many political issues – such as gender pay equality and transgender women’s participation in women’s sports – when used for writing assistance tasks, . It is unclear why this trend exists, but the team speculated it could be a consequence of training AI models to follow more general principles, such as incentivising truthfulness, fairness and kindness, rather than developers specifically aligning models with liberal stances.

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AI developers can still “steer the model to write very specific things about specific issues” by refining AI responses to certain user prompts, but that won’t comprehensively change a model’s default stance and implicit biases, says Röttger. This approach could also clash with general AI training goals, such as prioritising truthfulness, he says.

US tech companies could also potentially alienate many of their customers worldwide if they try to align their commercial AI models with the Trump administration’s worldview. “I’m interested to see how this will pan out if the US now tries to impose a specific ideology on a model with a global userbase,” says Röttger. “I think that could get very messy.”

AI models could attempt to if their developers share more information publicly about each model’s biases, or build a collection of “deliberately diverse models with differing ideological leanings”, says at the University of Washington. But “as of today, creating a truly politically neutral AI model may be impossible given the inherently subjective nature of neutrality and the many human choices needed to build these systems”, she says.