The year 2026 marks a decade since the Cambridge Analytica case became a symbol of the relationship between social media, personal data and elections. New controversies involving Meta in Brazil, alongside expectations surrounding the United States midterm elections, show that the central questions raised by the scandal remain unresolved.

In recent weeks, Meta has faced a series of allegations related to Brazil’s elections. Critics questioned the removal and later restoration of a video by singer MC Cabelinho concerning accusations involving Flávio Bolsonaro, as well as apparent differences in the visibility and recommendations of political profiles on Instagram and WhatsApp. Tests reported by media outlets also indicated that Meta AI generated images featuring campaign messaging for Flávio Bolsonaro but rejected equivalent requests involving Lula.

Other reported incidents included an almost 24-hour interruption that prevented Lula’s campaign from promoting posts in Instagram feeds and concerns about content moderation. The episodes prompted questions to Brazil’s electoral authorities about the neutrality of digital platforms.

Meta denied political favoritism in a statement published on October 16. The company attributed some incidents to technical failures, said that identified problems had been corrected and maintained that its rules were applied equally to all candidates.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed how personal information could be transformed into political targeting. Research led by Michal Kosinski examined whether Facebook activity, including users’ likes, could be used to infer psychological characteristics. According to material cited in the original account, millions of people completed personality questionnaires, allowing researchers to compare their answers with their activity on the platform.

Cambridge Analytica later adopted a similar approach for political purposes. A personality application attracted about 300,000 participants in 2014, while the company also collected information from friends connected to those users. The scandal eventually involved the personal data of 87 million Facebook profiles.

Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist at Cambridge Analytica, described the company as a propaganda operation that used personal profiles to identify people more receptive to conspiracy theories and then expose them to customized content. Brittany Kaiser, the company’s former director of business development, said the strategy focused on voters who could still change their minds, particularly in decisive U.S. states. These voters were targeted with blogs, articles, videos and advertisements designed to influence their behavior.

The account also described the role of data and digital advertising in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Alexander Nix, then Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, said the company used voter research to develop personality models and deliver highly targeted videos. The campaign reportedly spent one million dollars per day on Facebook advertising at the height of the project.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate in April 2018, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company had not done enough to prevent its tools from being misused. He said Facebook had been told that Cambridge Analytica deleted the data, but later reports suggested otherwise. Zuckerberg also said Facebook had assisted Trump’s campaign in the same general way it had worked with other campaigns.

The debate later shifted from data harvesting to content moderation and platform regulation. In January 2025, Zuckerberg said he would work with Donald Trump to oppose governments that, in his view, were targeting American companies and pushing for censorship. Meta also announced the end of its partnership with third-party fact-checking organizations, saying that users would instead be able to add corrections to potentially false or misleading posts.

In Brazil, the Supreme Federal Court expanded the circumstances in which digital platforms could be held responsible for criminal or offensive user content. The decision, concluded in June 2025 by a vote of eight to three, changed parts of the country’s Internet Civil Framework. The issue was revisited in 2026 by the court and the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The controversies surrounding Brazil’s elections and the continued influence of social platforms in political campaigns illustrate how the problems exposed by Cambridge Analytica have evolved. The technology, the rules and the political alliances have changed, but disputes over data, persuasion, moderation and the accountability of big tech companies remain central to the relationship between elections and social media.

Sources: Olhar Digital.