Meta said on October 20, 2026, that it had completed measures to comply with Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court’s order for equal treatment of presidential candidates Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro. The Associated Press reported that automatic blocks or limits on presidential campaign ad accounts would receive human review within two hours. Meta said the court-ordered restrictions did not apply to organic posts.
What Brazil’s electoral court ordered
The court ordered Meta to treat the two candidates equally after Lula’s campaign alleged that the platform’s practices favored Flávio Bolsonaro. Meta denied political bias. The Guardian reported that Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze said he had found no evidence of deliberate action by the company.
On October 19, the court gave Meta a further 24 hours to demonstrate equal treatment and raised the daily fine for non-compliance from 500,000 to 1 million Brazilian reais, Al Jazeera reported. The higher amount followed an earlier order setting the daily fine at 500,000 reais.
What Meta’s two-hour review covers
The review applies to automatic restrictions on presidential campaign advertising accounts: a block or limit would go to a human reviewer within two hours, according to the Associated Press’s account of Meta’s procedure. The company said the court-ordered restrictions concerned those accounts, not organic posts.
What the foreign-ad finding says
A separate issue concerns election ads promoted from outside Brazil. The Guardian reported on October 21 that NetLab had found at least 1,600 such ads. NetLab coordinator Débora Salles said the group had not identified bias toward either candidate.
