Brazil Campaigns Pour R$288.7 Million Into Meta

Brazilian campaigns declared at least R$288.7 million in spending with Meta in 2026, as the company faces court orders and criticism over its handling of political content ahead of Sunday’s presidential runoff. Spending more than doubled from the R$129 million reported in 2022, and Meta’s share of campaign spending rose from 1.9% to about 6%.

Who Profits

Meta owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, platforms used by the campaigns of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro. The Liberal Party declared R$63.7 million in spending with Meta, Flávio declared R$7.45 million, and Lula declared R$2.59 million. Final accounts are due November 3 and, for the runoff candidates, November 14.

The first round took place October 4. Flavio Bolsonaro received 47% of the vote and Lula 45%. Polls showed a very close race ahead of the October 25 runoff.

The candidates’ campaigns have sought to disqualify one another. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro’s lawyers asked the Superior Electoral Court to find that Lula abused his power by disseminating government postings through WhatsApp during the campaign. Bolsonaro’s camp said the government sent messages to millions of Brazilians promoting social programs, benefits and government initiatives. The request seeks to bar Lula and Social Communications Minister Sidonio Palmeira from public office for eight years.

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

The State's Role

The Superior Electoral Court voted unanimously on Tuesday, October 20, to uphold an injunction requiring posts linking Flávio Bolsonaro to Operation Unha e Carne and organized crime to be removed within 24 hours. The order also bars reposting the same or substantially identical material. The court found the posts offered no concrete data tying him to the Federal Police money-laundering investigation in the Rio de Janeiro area.

Justice Estela Aranha said online freedom of expression “is not absolute” and content could be removed when it violated electoral rules. Justice Floriano de Azevedo Marques said the posts attributed criminal conduct to a candidate without minimal factual support. Flávio’s defense said he wasn’t investigated, cited or mentioned in the operation.

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

Meta told the court it had complied with its decisions and treated content concerning both campaigns “equally and in a non-discriminatory way.” It denied negligence or resistance. The court raised its daily fine for non-compliance from R$500,000, about US$99,700, to R$1 million, about US$199,400. Meta said human reviewers would assess automatically imposed restrictions on official campaign ad accounts within two hours.

Enforcement and Its Limits

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 said using fraud policies against those accounts was overenforcement that “should have been escalated to an internal team of expert reviewers.” The board said election failures can include suppressing political speech through overenforcement and undermining electoral integrity through underenforcement.

After Brazil’s October 2022 election, the board asked Meta to create a measurable framework for assessing election integrity, including public metrics. The co-chairs said Meta still cited broad activity figures, including ads stored and accounts removed, and said this “must change.” Meta had pledged in 2025 to allow more speech and make fewer mistakes around elections and political debate; the co-chairs said it “still has more work to do to fulfill that promise.” The board’s statement imposed no requirements on Meta.

The board also raised the case of the No Kings Coalition’s Instagram account, which went offline during protests in the United States on October 17. Meta apologized, saying automated defenses wrongly flagged a surge of bot-like traffic 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 set a deadline of 5 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, October 21, for Meta to answer an open letter.

Meta also warned Brazil’s electoral court that the order would prevent government bodies, NGOs, news outlets and other groups from running ads on social issues from Monday, October 19, until after the runoff. The company said the restriction applied to ads, not organic posts or political discussion.