Meta Employees Denounce Interference in Brazilian Elections

Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.

Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.

This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.

Inside information is critical, and you can always try to do your part.

Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.

Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.

The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.

With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.

They're just signing a letter protesting it.

People who stay will not meaningfully push back. They can grumble. They can ask to be reassign to slightly different position. But, they will never have any option to actually do something meaningful from inside.

I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.

The incentives aren't there to behave as an ethical human being in business beyond getting caught breaking the law (for a narrow definition of ethics).

I say this as someone who fought for the smaller fry multiple times (one sexual harassment victim, one employee at risk of losing their visa, and multiple teams getting done to) in the workplace and came out of it with autistic burnout (I didn't know then about my autism) from the emotional labor leading to unemployment.

The incentives aren't there. I wish they were.

Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.

To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.

They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.

And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.

But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.

[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.

[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.

And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.

I couldn't live like that for long.

But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.

Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.

Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel

If Meta keeps those positions at all.

A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...

    (10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

    (11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

    (12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

does this mean they were ordered to take them down by the government? what can they do in that case?

- Meta AI refused to generate campaign images depicting Lula, but not Bolsonaro.

- If you asked for Meta AI to generate fictitious campaign images for fake candidates, they would have Bolsonaro’s party number. It would refuse to generate images with Lula’s party number claiming it can’t use real party numbers (Brazilians vote by typing the candidate’s number in an electronic voting machine)

- AI-powered translation was refusing to translate “presidiário” correctly when referring to Jair.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/meta-must-pr...

And it works! Nearly every comment here is just riffing on how this was definitely intentional and further evidence of the commenter's preconceived notions of Meta, etc, etc.

But please, just go ahead and trust the company that was fined $25 billion dollars last week for lying and misleading the public about its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/meta-must-pr...

1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.

2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.

Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.

And the fact that he did this years after Cambridge Analytica, just wow.

I wonder if it can even be stopped at this stage - Brazil can only arrest him or execs if they are in Brazil, even international warrants are tricky to enforce against people who can travel by private jet and mega-yacht.

That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.

It won’t.

- Less than 40.000 votes were cast during the extension. Lula won by more than 4 million votes.

- The Supreme Court Justice assigned to rule on the extension was selected by random chance, as protocol dictates.

- The Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) and its president, Nunes Marques, recognized the results of the election. He was appointed by Jair Bolsonaro.

This rhetoric is a sore loser’s.

I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.

So we should rather want these people to stay on for as long as possible, and make it hard for Meta to pull off such shit.

It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?