Brazil Trails Europe in Social Media Ad Transparency, Raising Foreign Influence Concerns

Brazil offers significantly lower transparency for political advertising on major social media platforms than the European Union and the United Kingdom, complicating oversight and raising concerns about undisclosed foreign influence in upcoming elections. That is the key finding of the “Data Not Found” report, a joint study by NetLab, a research laboratory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. The research analyzed 15 platforms and found that Brazil, which lacks a dedicated regulatory framework for platform data, consistently records the lowest levels of data access for researchers and the public across the three jurisdictions.

The lack of open data on spending, targeting, and funding makes independent auditing of political advertising extremely difficult in Brazil. For example, the study indicated that Meta’s ad transparency for its platforms like Facebook and Instagram in Brazil was vastly less robust than the system in the UK, which benefits from more established regulatory precedents and potential spillover from the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The result is a system that allows for “selective transparency,” where platforms provide detailed data only in jurisdictions with the most robust regulatory teeth. This absence of verifiable data in Brazil creates a significant risk that foreign or ‘dark money’ could flow into political campaigns, reaching millions of voters through micro-targeted ads that are nearly impossible for watchdogs to trace or for the public to scrutinize.

For foreign observers, this issue highlights the unique challenges in safeguarding Brazil election integrity. While Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) has passed resolutions to mandate platform compliance, including requiring searchable ad repositories for electoral propaganda, a comprehensive regulatory framework—like the country’s failed “fake news” bill (PL 2630/2020)—remains stalled in Congress. This places a disproportionate regulatory burden on the TSE, which must enforce rules against emerging threats like AI-generated deepfakes and sophisticated disinformation campaigns with limited access to the raw data needed for effective oversight. NetLab researchers, who were instrumental in legal action against Meta for failing to remove fraudulent ads, have also faced attempts by the platform’s legal teams to discredit their findings, underscoring the difficulties facing independent scrutiny.

The findings suggest that without a dedicated legal framework mandating comprehensive data access, platforms will continue to prioritize transparency only where legally required. The next major test for social media transparency will be the upcoming 2026 presidential election, where a lack of public disclosure about the source and target of online political spending could further undermine trust in the electoral process. The report’s authors explicitly recommend that Brazilian authorities follow the lead of the DSA and UK frameworks to support legal and ethical web scraping for public-interest research, particularly where platform-provided transparency remains insufficient.