On October 20, Meta told Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) that it had completed measures to comply with the court’s equal-treatment directive for the campaigns of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro. TSE spokesperson Tatiana Cochlar confirmed that the court received Meta’s response.
Meta said the court’s restrictions did not affect organic posts. It also said automatic blocks or limits on presidential campaign ad accounts would receive manual review within two hours.
What the TSE’s order covered
The TSE gave Meta a further 24 hours on October 19 to demonstrate equal treatment of the two campaigns. The reported order covered campaign reach, recommendations, search results and Meta’s AI tool. The possible daily fine rose from BRL 500,000 to BRL 1 million.
NeoTeo previously covered Lula’s campaign complaint and the TSE’s initial request to Meta. Lula’s campaign alleged that Meta’s restrictions and recommendation systems disadvantaged its content. Meta denied political favoritism and attributed operational incidents to technical limitations.
Separate incidents drew scrutiny
Meta’s Oversight Board criticized recurring failures in the company’s election enforcement and called for more transparent and consistent practices. The criticism came amid separate reports of problems affecting Lula’s campaign accounts.
On September 23, an anti-fraud review disabled the campaign’s advertising account for more than an hour. Meta said the action was a mistake. On October 9, Lula’s lawyers said they could not boost new Instagram posts for almost 24 hours; Meta described that disruption as a global outage affecting thousands of advertisers in multiple countries.
