Vladimir Cortés Roshdestvensky
Elections are no longer just civic rituals; they’re arenas where fundamental rights are tested. Freedom of expression, access to reliable information, and meaningful political participation now unfold inside digital environments that amplify voices while also accelerating distortion. In Chile, the electoral authority (Servicio Electoral de Chile, Servel) has sought to navigate this terrain with a rights-based approach, one that safeguards the integrity of the vote without narrowing the democratic conversation.
As Chile celebrates one of its most participatory elections in decades, it also confronted the widening gap between institutional capacity and platform power. Servel’s 2025 experience demonstrates that electoral authorities can build sophisticated monitoring tools, foster cross-sector collaboration, and advance transparency norms.
But without enforceable governance frameworks, these efforts rely on voluntary cooperation from platforms with global incentives and limited accountability.
This model exposes the structural tension between national institutions and private companies that shape online public debate. Servel expanded multi-stakeholder coordination, introduced new monitoring tools, and secured ethical commitments from major platforms. But it did so within a framework where meaningful enforcement power remains limited.
However, Chile’s challenge is not only one of regulating platforms. Information integrity also depends on the health of the broader ecosystem: trusted institutions, independent media, shared civic spaces, and the public’s ability to navigate increasingly AI-mediated environments. Research across Latin America highlights that digital integrity cannot be achieved solely through platform rules; it requires rebuilding trust, addressing information inequality, and strengthening community-based forms of communication.
The digital battlefield: Where Chile’s 2025 election was actually fought
When official campaigns launched on September 17, 2025, the battleground had already shifted decisively online. Within the first week, far-right presidential candidate José Antonio Kast spent nearly 27 million Chilean pesos (approximately $30,000 USD) on Meta advertising alone, dwarfing his competitors’ digital spending and signaling where Chilean campaigns now concentrate resources. Traditional banderazos – using flags to support a candidate – and leaflet distribution continued, but the real electoral combat unfolded across the digital sphere.
Yet, digital campaigning’s intensity came with darker dimensions. The pre-campaign period witnessed a “digital battle” where disinformation became a campaign weapon rather than an unintended byproduct. In late July 2025, center-right candidate Evelyn Matthei launched accusations against the Republican Party regarding a “dirty campaign” conducted through social media disinformation operations.
But here’s what reveals the system’s fundamental weakness: Matthei’s judicial offensive collapsed within 24 hours. Not because the allegations lacked merit, but because her own coalition pressured her to abandon the complaint.
This is precisely where Chile’s institutional limits become visible. When disinformation becomes a deliberate campaign tactic, and when affected candidates decline to pursue accountability, an electoral authority without investigative powers or platform oversight tools is limited to observation and reporting, without the authority to trigger a formal response. Coordination helps, but it cannot substitute for authority.
Chile entered the 2025 elections with an impressive 85.40% voter turnout (it is important to note that this was the first presidential election with compulsory voting) and its multi-stakeholder Mesa de Gobernanza. But the country’s recent history tells a more complicated story. During the 2022 constitutional referendum, Servel was forced to archive 202 disinformation complaints without opening a single investigation. Platforms routinely ignored its information requests (compliance rates hovered at zero), and the authority had no legal tools to compel a response. That legacy shaped the 2025 cycle: an electoral system equipped with better monitoring and stronger coordination, yet still navigating the same structural weaknesses that allowed manipulation to flourish in earlier contests. It is a reminder that institutional awareness has grown, but institutional power has not.
The collaborative response: Sophisticated tools without enforcement teeth
These political tensions exist alongside longstanding institutional frustration. Former Servel president Andrés Tagle noted in 2023 that platforms should be subject to similar transparency rules as broadcast media—particularly around advertising rates and contracts—to improve campaign spending oversight. He highlighted cases where Servel detected unreported propaganda due to inadequate platform disclosure, issuing fines that were symbolically important, though too small to influence the behavior of large global platforms.
In an effort to build a more comprehensive ecosystem, Servel and the UNDP launched the Mesa de Gobernanza para la Integridad de la Información (Governance Roundtable for Information Integrity) in August 2024. This multistakeholder space brought together regulators, platforms, journalists, fact-checkers like Mala Espina, civil society groups such as Fundación Ciudadanía Inteligente, and academic experts. On September 12, 2025, major platforms signed the Compromiso Ético por la Integridad de la Información Electoral, committing to six principles supporting informational integrity, protection from hate speech, and collaboration with the ecosystem.
These initiatives were supported by technological infrastructure. The eMonitor+ system, an AI-powered tool developed by UNDP and deployed by Servel, monitored social media in real-time to identify “toxic communication patterns and hate speech that may affect the integrity of the information”. Fact-checking organizations provided additional verification layers: Mala Espina created a digital government program comparator and AI-powered chatbot delivering verified candidate information, while Ciudadanía Inteligente launched the Semáforo Electoral website guiding citizens through electoral regulations and timelines.
These tools strengthened Chile’s ability to detect problematic content and understand its dynamics across platforms. But detection does not equal intervention. They could document how Kast’s advertising shaped the information environment or how disinformation narratives evolved, but they lacked the power to compel platforms to increase transparency or to respond promptly to Servel’s requests.
Together, these efforts improved situational awareness during the electoral cycle, but did not resolve the underlying structural limits.
The progress made by Servel, fact-checkers, and civil society fits within a broader regional trend: strengthening information integrity requires more than regulating technology companies. Civil society organizations across Latin America emphasize that healthy information ecosystems depend on rebuilding societal trust, supporting independent and community-led media, and ensuring people’s information needs are met. Information ecosystems are shaped by cultural, historical, and political forces, from media precarity to entrenched inequalities, that cannot be solved through platform governance alone.
Awareness without authority
Chile’s 2025 electoral experience crystallizes fundamental questions about governing technology platforms in democratic contexts. The Mesa de Gobernanza demonstrated that multi-stakeholder dialogue can produce concrete tools, shared commitments, and improved coordination. Chile can now map risks and coordinate actors, but it still lacks the institutional architecture needed to oversee platform behavior in a binding way.
Platform compliance continues to depend on voluntary cooperation – valuable but inconsistent. While Google, Meta, TikTok, and X signed the Compromiso Ético and implemented specific measures, these initiatives reflected self-regulatory commitments, without the legal enforceability that would ensure consistency. Patricia Peña, Universidad de Chile academic and president of Internet Society Chile Chapter, emphasized: “We are ceding an impressive amount of information to companies that do not always operate with total transparency regarding the use they give to our data,” calling for “public policies that address the challenges of social networks comprehensively […] establishing regulatory frameworks that guarantee respect for the digital rights of citizens, without limiting freedom of expression.”
Regionally, Chile faces a strategic crossroads, but the choice is more complex than a simple binary between enforcement and cooperation. Brazil’s judicial model — where courts and sectoral regulators can demand platform compliance — offers one path. Chile could move in that direction, granting Servel clearer authority and meaningful enforcement mechanisms. But discussions emerging in Latin America point to a broader range of options: hybrid regulatory mechanisms, shared oversight across existing institutions, and coordinated regional actions aligned with UNESCO’s framework for digital platform governance. Another route for Chile is to deepen a transparency-centered model focused on open data, independent auditing, and civil society verification. The region’s experience shows that durable governance rarely comes from one institution alone, but from ecosystems capable of supervising platforms collectively, with human rights as the organizing principle.
Chile sits in an institutional middle ground. It has built an impressive architecture for observation and collaboration, yet stopped short of the legislative reforms that would give those efforts real teeth. Servel can detect patterns, convene stakeholders, and issue warnings—but without a defined enforcement mandate, it still depends on platforms’ voluntary cooperation. The country has strengthened the “eyes and ears” of its electoral system, but not its ability to act when platforms fail to comply.
Institution adaptation within structural limits
The presidential runoff will test whether these collaborative mechanisms remain effective under increased polarization. But the broader question extends beyond a single election: how can Chile (and other countries in Latin America as well) ensure that democratic rights are protected in digital spaces where national oversight is inherently limited?
The path forward is not punitive but structural: regulatory measures that guarantee transparency, empower oversight bodies, and preserve freedom of expression while mitigating practices that undermine electoral and information integrity.
Chile’s experience offers a valuable lesson for democracies worldwide. Goodwill and voluntary commitments can strengthen the ecosystem, but they cannot substitute for institutional authority. Ensuring fair, informed, and inclusive elections in the digital age requires frameworks that view platform governance not as a purely technical issue, but as a central democratic concern.