The Regulatory Security State (RSS) has far-reaching political consequences for the world beyond the EU, for EU priorities and its ability to realize them. We show this point through an analysis of how the extension of the RSS into the digital played into a constellation of factors that skewed politics towards the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. We trace the connections from the General Data Protection Regulation through shifts in Facebook’s self-regulation to the Brazilian elections with the help of three conceptual tools: ‘infrastructures’, ‘regulatory design’ and ‘ripples’: the GDPR generated a regulatory redesign of infrastructures sending ripples travelling from the EU to Brazil, back and beyond. We contribute theoretically by developing concepts for contextualizing the RSS and empirically by demonstrating the political stakes of contextualizing the RSS. Both contributions have a bearing for analyzes of the RSS beyond the case we focus on.