Brazil’s presidential election wasn’t stolen

Former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently won a close presidential election in Brazil.

He defeated far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, but some of Bolsonaro’s supporters aren’t accepting the election results and are wrongly claiming it was stolen. 

"He drew these kinds of crowds and lost? Riiiiiight," said one Instagram post that shared a video of what appears to be a crowd of Bolsonaro supporters. 

"Another stolen election!" another post said.

These posts were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Bolsonaro has not publicly conceded the election but he hasn’t contested it either, and he urged his supporters to end their protests of the election’s results. 

Bolsonaro’s chief of staff has also said the president authorized him to begin the transition of power and Brazil’s Supreme Court issued a statement saying that by authorizing the transition of power, Bolsonaro had recognized the election results.

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The protests come after years of attacks by Bolsonaro on Brazil’s election systems, The New York Times reported that the president "built the myth of stolen elections in Brazil." Bolsonaro previously claimed that election officials counted votes in secret and that he suspected hackers tried to steal the 2018 election from him but failed.

Brazil’s election officials, fact-checking agencies and independent election-security experts who studied the country’s voting system said these claims are false, the Times reported. 

Claims of widespread election fraud in Brazil are now circulating in the United States, where misinformation about the upcoming U.S. midterm elections is already swirling. 

We’ve already debunked a claim that Bolsonaro would hold a press conference to announce a military audit of the election. This claim, that Brazil’s election was stolen, gets the same rating: False.