There are so many English articles about this topic that never explain what happened. I clicked on everything from Reuters to Al Jazeera and they're all reciting the same line about "accounts restricted".
The best I could find was from some translations of paywalled Brazilian articles like this one https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/em-mensagens-int...
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
The best I could find was from some translations of paywalled Brazilian articles like this one https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/em-mensagens-int...
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.