Brazil Runoff Puts Campaign Speech Under Court Scrutiny

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court has upheld an order requiring the removal of online posts linking Flávio Bolsonaro to a Federal Police investigation and organized crime, as presidential candidates seek legal action against one another before the October 25 runoff. The ruling and the court’s orders to Meta have put election speech and platform enforcement at the center of a close contest between President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Court Ruling and Campaign Claims

The Superior Electoral Court voted unanimously on Tuesday, October 20, to uphold an injunction requiring removal of the posts within 24 hours. It also barred users from reposting the same or substantially identical material. The court found no concrete data in the posts tying Flávio to Operation Unha e Carne, a Federal Police money-laundering investigation in the Rio de Janeiro area.

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

The Liberal Party's national directorate filed the case 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. Flávio's defense said he wasn’t investigated, cited or mentioned in the operation.

Lawyers for Bolsonaro separately asked the court on Tuesday to declare Lula and Social Communications Minister Sidonio Palmeira ineligible for public office for eight years. They alleged Lula abused his power through government postings distributed by WhatsApp, claiming messages to millions of Brazilians promoted social programs, benefits and government initiatives.

Lula's campaign said it would seek Bolsonaro's disqualification on Wednesday, alleging election interference by Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. A campaign source told AFP the petition would allege "algorithmic manipulation" intended to harm Lula's chances. The petition hadn’t been officially filed when the report was published.

Meta, Oversight and Election Rules

Meta told the electoral court it treated content concerning both candidacies "equally and in a non-discriminatory way." It said it had complied with the court’s decisions and denied negligence or resistance. The court gave Meta 24 hours to demonstrate compliance and threatened a daily fine, raising it from R$500,000, about US$99,700, to R$1 million, about US$199,400. Meta said human reviewers would examine automatic restrictions on official campaign ad accounts within two hours.

Meta's Oversight Board criticized what its co-chairs called "recurring enforcement failures" in election integrity work, citing technical restrictions affecting Lula's campaign ad accounts. They said the company must make enforcement "transparent and consistent" and protect political speech. In their view, using fraud policies against Lula's accounts was 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 protests in the United States on October 17. Meta said 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.

Flávio Bolsonaro received 47% of the vote and Lula 45% in the first round, sending both candidates into the runoff. Polls showed a very close race. 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 accounted for about 6% of declared campaign spending, up from 1.9% in 2022.