The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) of Brazil has ordered Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, to immediately adopt measures to ensure balanced treatment of the campaigns of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, ahead of the second round of the presidential elections scheduled for October 25. The resolution sets a daily fine of 500,000 reais (87,000 euros) if the company fails to comply with the provisions.
The decision by Judge Marco Aurélio Bellizze responds to an action presented by the coalition supporting Lula, which accused the tech company of limiting the reach and content generation of its campaign. The team from the Workers' Party (PT) reported that the artificial intelligence tool "Meta AI" refused to produce electoral material for the current president, while it did respond to similar requests about the far-right candidate. According to the Brazilian newspaper "Folha," Bellizze has granted the company a period of 24 hours to apply identical criteria to both candidacies and detail the parameters used, clarifying that, for now, there is no strong evidence of deliberate manipulation.
The judicial order, in effect until the conclusion of the second round on October 25, expressly prohibits Meta from unevenly reducing the dissemination of political content, limiting search results, or excluding publications from its recommendation systems.
Furthermore, according to the aforementioned newspaper, the company will not be able to block advertising accounts or restrict paid dissemination through automated processes without prior human evaluation, and must communicate any restrictions applied to the Electoral Justice within a maximum of two hours. At the same time, the TSE has determined that, within 24 hours, electoral propaganda ads, both in favor of and against the candidates, that have not been officially contracted by parties or coalitions, must be suspended, requiring the identification of those responsible and the amounts invested.
This judicial conflict is part of Lula's team's offensive against large digital platforms. In its statement, the official campaign also alleged that it was prevented from promoting posts on the president's official Instagram profile between October 9 and 10. Although Meta attributed what happened to a "global failure," the TSE has required the company to certify this technical error and restore the contracted advertising reach before October 21.