Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) has given Meta Platforms a 48-hour window to account for whether reach on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's social media accounts was deliberately throttled. Lula's campaign team lodged a formal complaint alleging that the technology group had acted to favour his opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, in the contest ahead of the 25 October runoff vote.
Dated October 10, the directive obliges Meta to document, account by account, every action taken against Lula's official profiles and against third-party accounts since August 16. Covered within that scope are reductions to reach, withdrawal from recommendation feeds, and constraints placed on search visibility.
Meta's parent company — the corporation behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — was directed by the court to account for anomalous viewership numbers recorded on campaign videos that went live on 7 October. A detailed explanation of why the campaign's advertising account was taken offline on 23 September is also required, along with the retention of all associated records, moderation logs, advertising data, and performance metrics.
In a statement reported by Estadao, Meta described the accusations as entirely without factual foundation. Meta told a prominent broadcaster that the technical problems raised in coverage were not confined to Brazil or to particular accounts, and that the company follows electoral rules while aiming to provide equal platform access to all sides — a position it set out as Lula's campaign lodged a formal complaint with the electoral court.
According to the statement, Meta had, within the preceding days, blocked Lula's profile from boosting posts across the Instagram feed, while view tallies on content published through his official account were also cut off, narrowing the audience those posts could reach. Lula's campaign team also noted that, ahead of the first-round vote on October 4, search results on Instagram had stopped returning profiles belonging to Lula and a number of other left-leaning politicians, with the campaign's written statement characterising the cumulative pattern of platform disruptions as grounds for suspecting that Meta had acted in ways that favoured Flavio Bolsonaro's candidacy over the integrity of the electoral process.
A plan to bring the dispute before Brazil's National Data Protection Authority was also outlined by the campaign, according to the G1 news portal.
Two research reports — one produced by fact-checking outlet Agência Lupa, the other by the Instituto Democracia em Xeque — formed the evidentiary basis of the formal complaint filed by Lula's Workers' Party (PT). Researchers behind the second study traced a web of 255 Instagram accounts whose content was generated and managed through artificial intelligence tools. Estadao reported that the accounts drew roughly 58 million views over the course of a single month, driven by content directed at Lula, the PT, and first lady Janja da Silva.
Judges at the hearing pressed Meta on whether the network had been detected and what steps followed, while directing both organisations to provide details of their respective methodologies. The company faces a requirement to detail how its TSE rule — which keeps candidates' profiles out of recommendation systems — gets enforced, and whether that enforcement holds equally across both campaigns.
After Meta submits its reply, both the Lula coalition and the Electoral Attorney General's Office will have a 24-hour window to file their own responses before the court takes up the campaign's petition for urgent relief.
Flavio Bolsonaro, whose father Jair Bolsonaro holds a criminal conviction following his time as president, sits in the Brazilian senate and has maintained political positions broadly aligned with those of US President Donald Trump. In the opening round held on 4 October, he drew 47.03% of the vote to take first place, while Lula — pursuing what would be a fourth, non-consecutive presidential term — trailed at 45.16%. Polling data gathered after the first round of voting has placed Bolsonaro ahead in projections for the runoff.
Following the first round of voting, Lula — at 80 years old — has sharply expanded his digital presence, releasing a stream of videos addressed to his online audience as part of an effort to reach the approximately 34 million Brazilians who abstained from voting.
Friction between Meta and Brazilian authorities took hold around the time Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January 2025. During that period, Meta's chief executive announced the dismantling of the company's US fact-checking operation and took aim at what he called "secret courts" in Latin America — remarks that many observers interpreted as a pointed reference to Brazil's Supreme Court. A 40-day suspension of X, the platform once known as Twitter, had been imposed by the court the year before, on the grounds that it was allowing false information to circulate.
Brazil's Digital Policy Secretary Joao Brant characterised Meta's conduct at the time as an alignment with the United States government against the European Union, Brazil, and other nations working to uphold online rights. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes stated that social media platforms are required to operate within Brazilian law regardless of statements made by technology executives. A binding Supreme Court ruling issued in June then established civil liability for platforms that do not take adequate steps to prevent or remove unlawful user-generated content.
The row involving Meta has taken shape against a backdrop of allegations, stretching back several months, that outside actors attempted to interfere in the electoral process. Abin, the intelligence body operating under Brazil's federal government, presented French and German diplomats gathered in Brasília with a briefing on purported interference by both the United States and Russia in the lead-up to the vote, according to a television news outlet.
A formal request lodged by Attorney General Jorge Messias on October 1 directed both the federal police and Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet toward an inquiry into a $1 million grant disbursed through the US State Department's Human Rights and Democracy Fund. The funding, reported by a news outlet the day before, is directed toward an initiative called "Countering Lawfare and Censorship in Brazil," which channels resources to civil-society organisations contesting what the programme describes as judicial overreach by the Supreme Court — the body that found Jair Bolsonaro guilty of attempting to overturn his 2022 election loss through a coup.
Both governments put forward the same position — that neither plays a role in shaping electoral outcomes in other countries or stirring up unrest beyond their own borders.
A letter addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, bearing the signatures of Democratic senators Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine, and Peter Welch, called on him to pledge formal acknowledgment of whoever prevailed in Brazil's election — a request dated September 28. The letter pointed to US tariffs and targeted sanctions introduced under the Trump administration, which the signatories described as an attempt to pressure authorities away from pursuing charges against Jair Bolsonaro. Among the items referenced in the document was an encounter between Trump and Flavio Bolsonaro.
A 25% tariff on a range of Brazilian goods took effect in July under a ruling by the Office of the US Trade Representative, which pointed to what it described as unfair trading arrangements — a move that followed a Supreme Court decision invalidating an earlier round of levies.
