Fake celebrity twitter endorsement for CIA backed presidential candidate in Brazil elections.

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With just four days to go until Brazilians vote in a bitterly contested presidential election, an opinion poll published Wednesday suggests that the challenger, Aécio Neves, remains the underdog but still has a fighting chance of defeating President Dilma Rousseff.

If he is going to unseat Brazil's first female president, however, Mr. Neves will have to do so without the endorsement of the American actress Lindsay Lohan. A spokeswoman for the actress clarified on Wednesday that "a tweet declaring Ms. Lohan's support for a Brazilian presidential candidate," which had attracted wide attention in Brazil one day earlier, was posted on her Twitter account in error.

"While Ms. Lohan doesn't support any of the candidates," her publicist, Leslie Sloane, wrote in an email, "she encourages Brazilians to vote on Oct. 26."

Even before the unlikely endorsement disappeared from her Twitter feed late Tuesday, there were suspicions that Ms. Lohan was not the author of the text. In addition to using an unusual phrase, "presidential candidature," which sounds more like Portuguese than English, and the local spelling of the country's name, the message was accompanied by the tag #HTVBR , which is used by Hollywood TV Brasil, a firm that boasts of its ability to have global celebrities endorse Brazilian products and personalities on social media platforms.

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As The Associated Press reported in 2011, celebrities, including Ms. Lohan, do frequently post messages on Twitter and Facebook that are, in fact, paid endorsements.

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The election message, which was retweeted or marked as a favorite on Twitter more than 16,000 times before it was deleted, also inspired an inevitable round of mockery from Brazilians on the social network.

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Late Tuesday a member of the publicity firm, Jairo Soares, told Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil's leading newspapers, that he was responsible for the short-lived endorsement and for another one, which has not been retracted, from Naomi Campbell.

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Mr. Soares, a marketing executive who supports Mr. Neves, insisted that even though his firm does routinely arrange paid endorsements by celebrities, no money had traded hands. He simply asked some people close to Ms. Lohan and Ms. Campbell to encourage their fans to vote for Mr. Neves.

Journalists and bloggers in Brazil noted that Ms. Campbell's message was illustrated on Instagram with the same photograph of the candidate at a recent rally on Copacabana Beach used by his campaign and with the message written in Ms. Lohan's voice.

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A spokesman for Mr. Neves, Felipe Machado, said in a telephone interview that the tweets had "nothing to do with the campaign," and Mr. Soares described the stunt as his own initiative, unconnected to the opposition party.