Electoral Oversight and the Realities of Digital Campaigning

Clara Iglesias Keller is one of the authors of the Weizenbaum Discussion Paper entitled “Current Challenges in Digital Elections”. She spoke with us about the background of the study, the new rules on online campaigning, microtargeting, AI content, and platform duties, and about what steps policymakers should take to protect electoral integrity.

What motivated this study on Brazil’s 2024 local elections?

The main motivation for this study was to contribute to a shared learning process among regulators facing the profound transformation that digital technologies have brought to elections. Across jurisdictions, electoral authorities are still struggling to adapt legal and institutional frameworks to a reality in which campaigning is increasingly permanent, platform-mediated, and shaped by data-driven and automated practices. For instance, despite years of research and policy debate, we still do not know how our current rules respond to, or fail to address, permanent campaigning; and disinformation remains a politically salient phenomenon now intensified by the expansion of generative AI.

Like others, the Brazilian experience offers a valuable opportunity for mutual learning. The focus of the study is not the 2024 local elections per se, but rather what they reveal about regulatory experimentation under conditions of institutional constraint. Faced with the absence of comprehensive legislative reform, the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court took a further step by explicitly regulating digital campaigning practices within its specific constitutional mandate. This included targeted interventions addressing issues such as deepfakes, microtargeting, platform accountability, and transparency.

By documenting and analyzing this regulatory move, the study aims to share an experience that can inform debates elsewhere, highlighting both the possibilities and limits of court-led regulation in responding to the evolving challenges of digital elections.

Your report highlights the regulations introduced by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court to manage online campaigning. How do you assess these measures?

The measures introduced by the Superior Electoral Court represent a significant institutional effort, even if many aspects remain contested. The Court was fulfilling a mandate embedded in Brazil’s electoral design, which assigns electoral justice a central role in regulating political propaganda. At the same time, the regulation raises important questions. Key concepts remain underdefined, enforcement capacities are uneven, and concerns about legal certainty and proportionality persist. These tensions are not unique to Brazil, but they are particularly visible in a context of democratic erosion, where higher courts have been pushed to the forefront of digital governance, and where the legislative branch has failed to approve comprehensive platform regulation.

For this reason, I see these measures less as a finished model and more as regulatory experimentation, especially since propaganda rules are revised every election. Further changes, including ahead of the presidential elections, should therefore be expected.

How do the new rules on microtargeting, AI-generated content, and platform duties, reshape the responsibilities of digital platforms during elections?

These rules apply strictly to electoral propaganda and to the electoral period, which means they do not and cannot establish the level of institutionalized accountability that democratic systems should ultimately impose on large digital platforms. Their scope is sectoral and temporary, addressing elections as a specific moment of heightened democratic risk rather than platform power more broadly.

Within these limits, the regulation expressly outlawed harmful practices like the promotion of misleading or decontextualized electoral content through advertising or search ranking, and demanded that platforms increase transparency around political advertising through public, real-time ad libraries and update their terms of service, reporting channels, and risk assessments for election years. The rules also impose clearer obligations around microtargeting and AI-generated content. Large-scale microtargeting using sensitive data or emerging technologies is classified as high risk, triggering data protection safeguards, while AI-generated content must be clearly labeled and deceptive deepfakes are banned. Together, these measures do not resolve platform accountability, but they do recalibrate platform duties during elections by explicitly linking technological practices to electoral integrity.

Based on your research, which steps should policymakers and platforms take to strengthen electoral integrity in the digital age?

Strengthening electoral integrity in the digital age requires moving beyond reactive, crisis-driven responses and investing in sustained governance frameworks. A first and central step is the adoption of secondary regulation that provide legal certainty in rapidly evolving digital environments. Electoral authorities should clarify how existing legal principles apply to practices such as AI-generated content, data-driven targeting, and platform-mediated visibility, while continuously refining regulatory instruments through public hearings and expert input. Moreover, these interpretations should be periodically assessed through systematic evaluations of implementation and enforcement.

At the legislative level, we need greater investment in comprehensive platform and electoral regulation, which is indispensable. Beyond solid platform regulation frameworks, lawmakers need to address points of tension that are often overlooked in mainstream debates. For instance, how platforms interact differently with political actors depending on their size, resources, or ideological positioning; or how digital communication undermines the traditional logic of bounded electoral periods through permanent campaigning. Without acknowledging these structural shifts, electoral competition risks becoming increasingly uneven.

Platforms, for their part, should treat elections as a high-risk period requiring integrity systems that go beyond minimal – or even performative – compliance. This includes transparent political advertising repositories, meaningful risk assessments, and measurable mitigation strategies.

Access to the paper “Current Challenges in Digital Elections”

Interview by Moritz Buchner