Whenever the state finds itself mildly inconvenienced by the unpredictable tides of public opinion, it reacts with the measured composure of an aging patriarch who has just discovered someone moved his favorite armchair. Down in Brasília, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is currently throwing just such a fit. Facing an upcoming political contest against Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula has looked upon the sprawling, messy expanse of modern digital communication and decided that the only reasonable remedy for an unflattering algorithm is to have his rival barred from the ballot entirely. It is a spectacle as predictable as it is pathetic, perfectly illustrating the permanent neurosis of the governing class: if the peasants are not behaving as instructed, the apparatus must simply cancel the choices.
The grievance, as reported, centers on accusations that Meta has been giving preferential digital treatment to the younger Bolsonaro, an allegation the American tech conglomerate has naturally denied. One might think that in a mature republic, an incumbent executive commanding the vast machinery of public office could counter a few unfavorable social media impressions with superior arguments, or at least with better rhetoric. But that would require trusting the spontaneous order of human exchange, a concept that gives central planners hives. For the political mind, persuasion is exhausting and inherently risky; bureaucratic prohibition, on the other hand, is crisp, tidy, and deliciously coercive.
We are reminded, not for the first time, of Friedrich Hayek’s biting observation that the curious task of economics—and indeed, of anyone attempting to preserve human liberty—is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Lula and his coterie imagine they can centrally plan the national conversation, calibrating every digital node until the populace reflects the exact ideological equilibrium favored by the ministries. When private citizens and corporate servers generate results that deviate from this imagined blueprint, the political class does not see an organic cultural drift or the chaotic beauty of an open marketplace. They see sabotage. And when the state suspects sabotage, its hand reaches instinctively for the gavel and the padlock.
There is something deeply revealing about the demand for disqualification over an alleged algorithmic skew. Disqualification is the nuclear option of electoral politics, the ultimate admission that one cannot win on the merits of one’s own program. It assumes that voters are not sovereign, discerning individuals capable of weighing evidence, enduring political nonsense, and making up their own minds, but rather helpless lumps of soft clay waiting to be permanently deformed by Mark Zuckerberg’s recommendation engines. It is an exquisitely insulting view of the citizenry, treating voters like impressionable toddlers who must be shielded from the wrong fairy tales by their benevolent bureaucratic guardians.
This is hardly Brazil’s first flirtation with digital authoritarianism; the country’s judiciary has spent the last few years treating the internet like an unruly tenant that needs periodic eviction notices. Between blocking entire messaging applications and threatening corporate executives with regulatory ruin, the Brazilian state has cultivated an appetite for speech management that ought to make anyone who values individual liberty shudder. Once a government establishes the precedent that an election can be altered not by the votes cast, but by judicial decree regarding which platforms were sufficiently balanced, the entire democratic pretense collapses into a courtroom squabble among elites.
Meta, like any vast multinational enterprise, is primarily concerned with its own bottom line and the retention of human eyeballs, not the moral destiny of South American governance. The notion that an advertising corporation based in California is running a sophisticated, deliberate conspiracy to subvert the will of Brazilian voters belongs in the fever swamps of late-night talk radio, not in official presidential petitions. But the state loves a foreign scapegoat. It allows politicians to avoid the uncomfortable reality that millions of their fellow countrymen simply do not like them, and that they might use whatever tools are at their disposal to organize in opposition.
If every political leader were permitted to disqualify their rivals whenever an algorithm failed to flatter them, the world’s parliaments would consist entirely of unopposed autocrats lecturing empty rooms. The digital public square is inevitably noisy, frequently biased, and hopelessly resistant to bureaucratic standardization. That is precisely why it is valuable. The urge to sanitize it through the heavy hand of the state is nothing more than the old, tyrannical impulse dressed up in modern technological jargon. Lula would do well to put down the regulatory ban-hammer, step away from the courtroom doors, and try the unfashionable art of letting the people choose for themselves.