The cyberactivism movement Sleeping Giants Brasil filed a Statement of Fact with the General Inspectorate of Electoral Justice at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The objective is to request an investigation into possible flaws in the recommendation systems of the X platform during the 2026 elections.
This action comes after the organization prompted the Electoral Public Prosecutor's Office to contest the implementation of a feature on the platform designed to block the recommendation of candidate profiles to users who do not follow them.
The issue gained prominence when analyses conducted by Sleeping Giants Brasil and Folha de S.Paulo revealed that the filter implemented by X did not cover all candidate profiles registered with the Electoral Justice. In a collection carried out on August 23, the mechanism covered only 665 accounts, while there were over 2,100 declared candidate profiles with the TSE, leaving at least 1,442 accounts without the restriction.
In practice, candidates included in the filter had their content removed from suggestions for those who did not follow them, but the excluded accounts remained vulnerable to algorithmic distribution.
For Sleeping Giants Brasil, this disparity can create unfair conditions among candidacies subject to the same electoral legislation.
However, the subsequent correction did not resolve the raised issue. After new verifications, the organization found that candidate profiles continued to be suggested in the 'Who to follow' functionality. A report analyzed on August 27, cited by ICL Notícias, showed names such as Nikolas Ferreira, Sergio Moro, and Tarcísio de Freitas in the recommendations, and Sleeping Giants Brasil also reported that Nikolas's account was suggested multiple times.
Humberto Ribeiro, co-founder and legal director of Sleeping Giants Brasil, emphasized that such a function must be viewed as a recommendation system because it actively suggests accounts to users, stating: 'There is no more obvious mechanism for account recommendation than 'Who to follow'. You are recommending an account to be followed.'
The entity reported generating four technical reports through Verifact to document the tests performed on the platform, the last one dated August 27, meaning after the filter update.
Electoral rules and algorithmic action
Brazilian electoral norms impose limits on how platforms can operate algorithmically during the campaign period. The regulation established by the TSE for 2026 includes specific restrictions on the recommendation, suggestion, and prioritization of candidacies by artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
The main concern is preventing automatic platform mechanisms from creating artificial inequalities in the visibility of candidacies. In the context of X, the controversy revolves around whether the partial or limited application of this mechanism allows certain candidates to continue receiving algorithmic distribution, while others are removed from recommendations.
This case had already reached the TSE through another route. On August 26, the coalition of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prompted the Court, alleging possible favoritism towards candidacies. The next day, Minister André Mendonça ordered X to provide clarification on its algorithm and preserve technical data, lists, and codes related to the mechanism.
Mendonça assessed that if the filter's application is selective, it could cause a significant asymmetry in the circulation of electoral content among legally equivalent candidacies. The minister also ordered the maintenance of this information to allow for the analysis of the system's functioning.
In the new petition presented to the TSE, Sleeping Giants Brasil requests that the Electoral Justice investigate both the functioning of the filter and the impacts caused by its incomplete implementation during the electoral period. The organization argues that the subsequent update of the mechanism does not nullify the need to analyze the previous period, when hundreds of accounts registered with the TSE were outside the restriction list.
The request also covers the preservation of technical data from the system, such as logs, filter versions, records of account inclusion and exclusion, code modifications, and exposure metrics. This aims to allow the Electoral Justice to determine which accounts were included or removed, when these changes occurred, and what the effects were on content distribution.
Furthermore, the organization asks that supervision be extended to other major platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Kwai. According to Sleeping Giants Brasil, the problem on X was easier to identify because the platform itself made the filtering mechanism code available. The entity argues that other networks do not offer a comparable level of transparency to allow for an independent audit of their recommendation systems.
This entire discussion takes place while electoral campaigning is underway. For Sleeping Giants Brasil, the ability of an algorithm to automatically suggest certain candidacies to users who do not yet follow them can directly affect the exposure of these campaigns.