Brazil Court and Meta Tighten Grip on Election Speech

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court upheld an order requiring social media posts linking Flávio Bolsonaro to a Federal Police investigation and organized crime to come down within 24 hours, as both presidential campaigns try to disqualify their rival before Sunday’s runoff. The order also bars users from reposting the same or substantially identical material. Election speech now sits between court orders, party petitions and a platform whose mistakes can silence political accounts.

Who Gets to Speak

The posts tied Flávio Bolsonaro to Operation Unha e Carne, a Federal Police money-laundering investigation in the Rio de Janeiro area, and to organized crime, militias, money laundering and rachadinha, an illegal scheme in which aides return part of their pay to a lawmaker. Flávio’s defense said he wasn’t investigated, cited or mentioned in the operation. The court found that the posts offered no concrete data tying him to it.

The Liberal Party’s national directorate brought the case against federal deputy Guilherme Boulos, Workers’ Party federal deputies Gleisi Hoffmann, Lindbergh Farias and Rogério Correia, and operators of five accounts. The case also named Aurilene Monteiro, known online as “Gata Canhota.” The court summary didn’t identify a platform.

Justice Estela Aranha said online freedom of expression isn’t absolute and that courts can remove content when it violates electoral rules. Justice Floriano de Azevedo Marques said the posts attributed criminal conduct to a candidate without minimal factual support. Justices André Mendonça, Dias Toffoli, Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva and Sebastião Reis Júnior also backed the order. Court president Kassio Nunes Marques announced the unanimous result.

The campaigns are taking their fight to the electoral court, too. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro’s lawyers asked the court to declare Lula and Social Communications Minister Sidonio Palmeira ineligible for public office for eight years, alleging Lula’s “abuse of power” through government postings sent by WhatsApp. Bolsonaro’s camp claimed those messages to millions of Brazilians promoted social programs, benefits and government initiatives.

Lula’s campaign said it would seek Bolsonaro’s disqualification on Wednesday over alleged election interference by Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The petition hadn’t yet been officially filed when the report was published. A campaign source told AFP it would allege “algorithmic manipulation” aimed at harming Lula’s chances. Lula’s campaign had also accused Meta of suppressing his online content to boost Bolsonaro.

Platforms, Courts and Campaign Money

Meta said it had completed steps to comply with the electoral court’s decision to treat both campaigns equally. The court gave Meta 24 hours to demonstrate compliance and threatened a daily fine of about $200,000. In a filing reported Tuesday, Meta said content concerning both candidacies was “treated equally and in a non-discriminatory way,” and denied negligence or resistance. The court increased the daily fine from R$500,000, about US$99,700, to R$1 million, about US$199,400.

Meta said human reviewers would examine any restriction automatically placed on official campaign ad accounts within two hours. The company also warned that the court order would stop government bodies, NGOs, news outlets and other groups from running ads on social issues in Brazil from Monday, October 19, until after the runoff. Meta said the restriction covered ads, not organic posts or political discussion.

Campaigns had declared at least R$288.7 million, about US$57.6 million, in spending with Meta in 2026, compared with R$129 million, about US$25.7 million, in 2022. Meta made up about 6% of declared campaign spending, up from 1.9% in 2022. The Liberal Party declared R$63.7 million, Flávio declared R$7.45 million and Lula declared R$2.59 million. Candidates had to submit final accounts by November 3 and, for the runoff candidates, November 14.

The Moderators’ Own Record

Meta’s Oversight Board co-chairs said the company had “recurring enforcement failures” in election integrity work. They cited technical restrictions affecting Lula’s campaign ad accounts and political activist accounts removed during protests in the United States. They said Meta must make enforcement “transparent and consistent” and protect political speech. They called applying fraud policies to Lula’s ad accounts overenforcement that “should have been escalated to an internal team of expert reviewers.”

The Board also cited the No Kings Coalition’s Instagram account, which went offline during nationwide protests in the United States on Saturday, October 17. Meta apologized, saying automated defenses wrongly flagged a surge of bot-like traffic it linked to an AI tool reading profiles and hashtags. Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the outage lasted about an hour; the coalition said it lost access for longer. The coalition gave Meta until 5 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, October 21, to answer an open letter. The Board said the error “should have been caught” and asked why No Kings accounts weren’t included in a program that provides human review of important civic accounts.

The Board’s statement set no requirements for Meta. It said the company still relied on broad activity figures, such as ads stored or accounts removed, despite a request after Brazil’s October 2022 election for a measurable framework with public metrics. The runoff between President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, is set for October 25. The first round gave Flavio Bolsonaro 47% and Lula 45%; polls showed a very close race.