Brazil's top electoral court fined Meta R$7.5 million, about US$1.3 million, on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, for ignoring its orders during the October 25 presidential runoff. The company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp missed deadlines and handed over incomplete information while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faced his conservative challenger, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. That was one day ago. The runoff itself is about two and a half weeks gone.
Who Has the Power
One corporation sits on the pipes that carry political speech for hundreds of millions of people. When the Superior Electoral Court, the TSE, told Meta in mid-October to treat the Lula and Bolsonaro campaigns equally on its platforms, Meta didn't comply on time. Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze, who handled the case, said the company delivered information after the court's deadlines and in pieces, some of it in a foreign language and in technical terms. That made it hard for the court to check whether the orders were being followed.
Read that again. A national electoral court, with its full constitutional machinery, couldn't verify what a private company was doing to the flow of political information in the middle of a presidential runoff.
Bellizze put it plainly: platforms hold power over political information through algorithms that are not transparent. He called for audits and oversight.
Who Gets Crushed
Lula's campaign had complained that its posts reached fewer people and that its paid ads were restricted. Ângelo Ferraro, a lawyer for the campaign, told the court that Meta stopped being a platform and became a political actor that, in his words, apparently chose a side.
The bench didn't go that far. Bellizze said the case did not prove, at this stage, that Meta acted on purpose to tilt the race towards Bolsonaro, and found no proof that Meta deliberately favoured a candidate. Meta denies any political bias and blames technical failures.
So the people on the receiving end, voters trying to see what the campaigns were saying, were left inside a black box nobody outside the company could open. Their information diet was set by algorithms they can't see, run by a company that answers to shareholders.
What They're Calling "Accountability"
The full TSE bench voted unanimously on the night of Tuesday, November 10, to follow Bellizze. The fine covers nine days of penalties: three days at R$500,000, about US$90,000, from October 17 to 19, and six days at R$1 million, about US$179,000, from October 20 to 25, the day of the runoff. The US$1.3 million figure is based on 5.58 reais per US dollar on November 10.
Meta's reply was to argue that the case lost its purpose once the election was over, according to Itatiaia, a Brazilian radio station. The election's over, so why bother. Whether Meta will appeal or pay isn't known, and no payment deadline has been reported.
The remedy on offer is more oversight: audits of algorithms, supervised by the same kind of state apparatus that arrived after the runoff was decided. A fine, a promise of audits, and a company telling the court the matter is moot. Nothing in the ruling changes who owns the machinery, who writes the code, or who decides what reaches the voter's screen.
The court has told everyone what it couldn't see. It has not said how it will see it next time.
- meta
- brazil electoral court
- luiz inácio lula da silva
- flávio bolsonaro
- election orders
- algorithm audits
- platform fine