POLITICO's Decoded Podcast Examines Silicon Valley's Stake in Brazil's Runoff and New Polling on an AI Bubble

POLITICO's technology podcast Decoded used its Friday, Oct. 23 episode to examine why Brazil's presidential runoff, held Sunday, Oct. 25, is being watched closely by Silicon Valley, and to discuss new polling on whether Americans see artificial intelligence as an investment bubble. The 15-minute episode, titled "Why Silicon Valley is watching Brazil's election, David Shor on AI bubble" on Apple Podcasts, was hosted by POLITICO senior reporter Sam Sutton and featured Eva Hartog, Latin America correspondent for the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO, and David Shor, head of data research at the Democratic polling firm Blue Rose Research.

The episode accompanied the same day's Decoded newsletter, which described Brazil's Supreme Electoral Tribunal as "the democratic world's most aggressive governmental enforcer of political speech" and said the vote "may also determine the future of one of Silicon Valley's top overseas boogeymen, in Latin America's largest market."

Why the runoff matters to tech platforms

According to a published transcript of the episode, Hartog told listeners that "Brazilians are among the world's top users of tech platforms, but Brazil also has some of the tightest social media regulations." She said right-wing Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro and the tech world "share a common enemy": Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who formerly presided over the electoral tribunal and whom she described as an ally of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Hartog said on the episode that the tribunal "can open cases, investigate them, rule on them all in one," and pointed to August 2024, when it temporarily blocked Brazilians' access to X for about six weeks. POLITICO's newsletter reported that the tribunal has also ordered Apple and Google to remove Telegram from their app stores, and that in 2025 Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, and Rumble sued Moraes in a U.S. federal court. The newsletter said the Trump administration's Treasury Department briefly sanctioned Moraes over what it said were free-speech violations.

POLITICO reported that a Flávio Bolsonaro victory would likely weaken the tribunal, noting that he has campaigned on loosening social media regulations and has said he would impeach Moraes if elected. The newsletter added that even under that scenario, Silicon Valley "wouldn't be done worrying about Brazil," because Lula helped establish rules holding platforms liable for user content and placed enforcement power in a separate government agency.

Meta and X under court scrutiny

The episode was released days after Brazilian court rulings involving Meta. Al Jazeera reported on Oct. 19 that the tribunal gave Meta 24 hours to show it was not favoring either presidential candidate in its feeds and doubled a daily noncompliance fine from 500,000 reais to one million reais. Al Jazeera said the order responded to a complaint from Lula's campaign, and that Meta has denied favoring either candidate while acknowledging some of Lula's campaign ads were taken offline temporarily due to technical errors. POLITICO reported that Meta called the allegations of political bias "false and unfounded."

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes told Decoded that the Meta episode represented "bad behavior from a Big Tech player," adding, "There will certainly be proceedings about this." In an Oct. 23 dispatch, Xinhua reported that the tribunal's inspector general, Ricardo Villas Boas Cueva, gave Meta and X 24 hours to provide technical explanations of their use of artificial intelligence, the distribution of political content, electoral ads and post removals, with a daily fine of 500,000 reais for each company for unjustified noncompliance.

Valor International reported on Oct. 23 that, according to updated tribunal figures, presidential candidates filed 804 lawsuits and other legal actions in 2026, more than double the 388 filed in 2018 and the 325 in 2022. Tribunal President Kassio Nunes Marques told Valor, "But what we are seeing in 2026 is unprecedented." Heading into the vote, a compilation by Poder360 found Flávio Bolsonaro numerically ahead of Lula in 17 of 18 recent national surveys, including a Datafolha poll conducted Oct. 23-24 that showed him with 51% of valid votes to Lula's 49%, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

Polling on an AI bubble

The episode's second segment featured Shor discussing an October survey that Blue Rose Research conducted and shared exclusively with Decoded. POLITICO reported that the survey, released by the think tank Center for Shared AI Prosperity, found Americans believe the AI boom has created an investment bubble by almost a 2-to-1 margin. According to the newsletter, more than 40% of the 4,700 respondents said AI is a bubble, compared with 22% who called it a "smart investment," and 48% said they expect AI and tech company stocks to fall sharply within the next three years.

The newsletter reported that nearly 60% of respondents said AI companies have become "too big and embedded in our economy to fail" and that the government should set limits on how much any single AI company can control. It said 65% viewed AI usage by banks, trading firms and lenders as a danger to the economy, while 15% said it would make markets more efficient.

Shor told Decoded, "I have not personally seen any form of AI regulation that I've [surveyed] poll poorly, even when you have very strong counter arguments." He added, "People in general are really quite negative about the technology outside of a very small share of use cases," and said, "This is all downstream of voters [being] very unhappy about the economy." POLITICO reported that Shor identified Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) as having successfully linked AI risks to anxieties about a future economic slump.

About the show

Sutton, Calder McHugh, Christine Mui and Brendan Bordelon are each identified in their POLITICO biographies as a co-author and podcast co-host of Decoded by POLITICO, which the biographies describe as the publication's global technology vertical. The Oct. 23 episode followed an Oct. 22 installment in which McHugh and Bordelon discussed exclusive recordings of Peter Thiel's lecture series, according to the show's Apple Podcasts page.