Sparks: Lula's campaign seeks to disqualify Bolsonoro from Brazil presidential vote over Meta 'interference'

Before we debate the interference, we must catalogue the instrument: what algorithm, trained on what corpus, adjusted by what human hand, at what hour, and recorded in whose ledger - without this provenance, every claim of manipulation remains an opinion about the weather.

The complaint that the platform suppressed one campaign and amplified another is the return of the repressed: the electorate has always been shaped by forces it cannot name, and now one of those forces has been given a subpoena.

The claim is that Meta interfered; trace the conditions - the server, the engineer, the ad buyer, the user who clicked, the law that permits it - and 'interference' dissolves into a network with no single agent to disqualify.

Meta built a creature that sorts the speech of millions, and now that the creature has chosen a favourite in the election, its makers profess astonishment that it possesses preferences at all.

Do not ask whether the algorithm favoured your rival; ask instead who owns the algorithm, for the man who owns the scale owns the weight, and the election is merely the feather.

'Algorithmic manipulation' - note the phrase: the manipulation has no manipulator, the algorithm has no author, and the passive voice has been granted the right to vote.

They want to disqualify a man because a machine preferred him - as if the machine had not already been preferring someone every day for ten years while they held their hearings.

That a private corporation, having been granted the immunities of a publisher without the responsibilities of one, should now determine which citizens hear which candidate - this is not a development the framers envisioned, nor one that reason can sustain.

In this best of all possible worlds, the algorithm is neutral, the platform is transparent, and the candidate who benefits from invisible promotion is the first to demand an investigation into invisible promotion.

They tell me the algorithm suppressed one campaign and boosted another, but I have seen the voters in the favela who have no algorithm at all, and I ask: whose interference are we really counting?