Brazil’s top electoral court set new standards Tuesday for what it will consider artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes in political advertising, tightening the rules around a campaign system already soaked in manipulation ahead of October elections. The court’s move comes as candidates and their machines fight over public attention, while broadcasters still carve up airtime and the state decides which synthetic lies count as acceptable and which ones cross the line.
At the center of the case was opposition candidate Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, who used the mechanism in his party’s convention to feature AI-generated images of his imprisoned father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, endorsing his campaign against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced in November to 27 years in prison for leading a coup attempt. The convention in Sao Paulo in July showed how political power keeps reaching for new tools, even when the old ones are already drenched in scandal and punishment.
Who Gets to Shape the Message
The electoral court issued the ruling late Tuesday in a case that exposed how the apparatus tries to police its own propaganda while still leaving the campaign machine intact. In a 4-3 vote, the court decided not to punish Sen. Bolsonaro, ruling that the deepfake in question did not count as a political ad for public airing, but as material for a private event before his candidacy was officially announced. That distinction matters because the same synthetic image that helped sell a political project in private was treated as outside the court’s reach once the lawyers and judges drew their line.
In a separate 5-2 vote, the court defined what qualifies as a deepfake in political advertising as “synthetic content produced or manipulated via artificial intelligence or equivalent technology” with a degree of realism “to create, reproduce or alter the image, voice or speech of any living, deceased or fictional person.” The language is precise. The machinery of control always likes precision when it’s writing the rules for everyone else.
What the Powerful Call Order
Brazil’s presidential elections are heavily played online, though television and radio ads continue to set the talk of the town and sway voters. The rules will apply to a vast amount of content from candidates ahead of the first round of voting on Oct. 4. Broadcasters must set aside 14 minutes a day for nearly 1,000 30-second ads, in addition to 12 1/2-minute blocks reserved exclusively for presidential candidates. That’s the managed spectacle: a narrow channel of approved speech, rationed out by institutions that claim to protect democracy while deciding who gets heard and how often.
The court’s ruling lands inside a campaign already shaped by hierarchy from top to bottom. Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for leading a coup attempt hangs over the political field, while his son’s campaign used an AI-generated version of the former president to urge attendees “to open arms” for his son and support his presidential bid. The image was built to move people, not inform them. That’s the point of the trick.
The System Polices Its Own Theater
The court’s new standards are aimed at curbing misinformation and manipulation, but the facts on the ground show a political arena where the biggest players still dominate the channels, the airtime, and the narrative. The rules now cover a huge volume of campaign content before Oct. 4, yet the same institutions that set the limits also preserve the structure that makes the manipulation profitable in the first place.
The ruling did not punish Sen. Bolsonaro. It did define deepfakes. It did not change the fact that broadcasters must set aside 14 minutes a day for nearly 1,000 30-second ads, or that presidential candidates get 12 1/2-minute blocks reserved for them. The machinery keeps running. The court just adjusted the dials.