Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) ordered Meta to ensure equal treatment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro ahead of the Oct. 25 runoff, the Associated Press reported. The order, as AP described it, bars reducing political-content distribution, restricting searches or removing posts in ways that create an imbalance, and requires Meta’s AI to apply identical criteria to both candidates. Meta denied political bias.
What the TSE reportedly required
AP reported that the TSE’s order called for immediate measures to ensure equal treatment of the two candidates. Meta could face a fine of 500,000 Brazilian reais per day for noncompliance, according to AP.
The reported terms address several ways a platform can shape what voters encounter: the distribution of political content, search results, post removals and the criteria applied by Meta’s AI. The order concerns practices that create an imbalance between the candidates, rather than a blanket ban on moderation.
The reported campaign-platform problems
Folha de S.Paulo reported, citing internal Meta messages, that Lula’s Instagram account could not boost feed posts for nearly 24 hours on Oct. 9. The account could still promote new “dark posts,” and existing boosted posts continued to run, Folha reported.
Folha also described a separate five-hour global data outage on Oct. 7 that affected more than 3,000 accounts and disrupted view-count data. Its account of the internal messages said a WhatsApp search for “Exército do Lula” returned “Canal do Lula,” “Tropa do Flávio” and the Workers’ Party channel. Folha separately reported that Instagram recommended Flávio Bolsonaro’s profile while failing to return Lula’s profile in an exact-name search.
Meta denied bias; the reported messages did not admit intent
Lula’s campaign alleged that platform restrictions and recommendations disadvantaged its content and favored Bolsonaro-related material. Meta denied political bias and attributed the incidents to technical, anti-fraud or regulatory explanations, the AP reported. Folha said the internal conversations it reviewed discussed operational failures but contained no admission of intentional election interference.
Público reported that TSE Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze said the evidence at that point was insufficient to conclude that Meta had deliberately manipulated distribution, while finding electoral safeguards necessary. The reported platform incidents and the campaign’s allegation therefore remain distinct from a judicial finding of intent.
A wider political-ad study
In a report published Oct. 16, the AP described a Federal University of Rio de Janeiro research-group study of irregular political ads on Meta from July through September. The group identified at least 1,613 ads, with 171 million views and about 2 million reais in revenue, according to AP. The study examined a broader pool of political advertising than the specific restrictions reported on Lula’s campaign.
