Brazil's Electoral Court Weighs Meta Case Over Alleged Election Interference

Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) will rule on Tuesday on the merits of a lawsuit filed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's campaign accusing Meta of interfering in the distribution of political content during the presidential race. The case has already produced the court's October order barring the company from favouring candidates or artificially limiting their posts on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

The full bench will now examine the campaign's requests definitively, weeks after the run-off ended on 25 October. The ruling lands in the middle of Brazil's unresolved debate over how far digital platforms may go during elections.

What did the court order in October?

The plenary ratified, unanimously and on 16 October, an injunction issued by Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze, the case's rapporteur. The provisional measure bound Meta to treat both campaigns equally — Lula's and Flávio Bolsonaro's of the PL party — until the second round closed.

Bellizze's decision prohibited Meta from:

• artificially reducing the distribution of political-electoral content;
• excluding posts from recommendation systems;
• restricting their visibility in search tools;
• manipulating reach metrics for either campaign.

The order carried an exception: Meta could still apply previously announced platform policies, provided it enforced them uniformly for both candidates, and could comply with judicial orders and electoral-court rules.

Why did the Meta AI tool trigger the suit?

The campaign reported that Meta AI refused to generate certain images of the president while fulfilling similar requests involving Flávio Bolsonaro. Bellizze ordered the company to apply equivalent criteria to both candidacies in the AI tool.

The injunction also reached advertising. Meta was barred from running political-electoral ads aimed at Brazilian audiences when contracted or managed by foreign accounts, and it had to prevent improper automatic blocks on the campaigns' ad accounts.

Bellizze further ordered an investigation of 255 profiles flagged as part of a possible inauthentic-behaviour network, and verification of AI-use disclosure on 1,204 posts. Non-compliance carried a daily fine of R$ 500,000.

The fine order covered the injunction period; Tuesday's judgment decides what, if anything, follows.

What is the likely outcome?

According to private assessments within the court shared with O Globo, the justices tend toward recognising problems in the platform's conduct while concluding that the nature of the procedure and the lack of sufficient evidence prevent a definitive finding of interference in the electoral process.

Those assessments hold that a deeper probe — an Electoral Judicial Investigation Action (AIJE), a dedicated procedure for probing electoral violations — would be needed to determine whether the identified failures translated into favouritism toward either candidacy.

In plain terms: the court may fault Meta's behaviour without convicting it of interference.

That distinction matters for advertisers and platforms alike. A merits ruling that flags operational failures but defers the interference question would keep the pressure on platform governance — recommendation systems, AI generation, ad-account integrity — while leaving the harder precedent for a future investigation to settle.