Brazil Court Gives Meta 24 Hours to Prove Election Fairness

Rio de Janeiro (GNP): Brazil’s top electoral court has given US technology company Meta 24 hours to show that its platforms treat President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and challenger Flavio Bolsonaro equally, days before Sunday’s presidential runoff.

The Superior Electoral Court issued the order on Monday after complaints from Lula’s campaign. The campaign alleges that Meta restricted the visibility of its candidate’s political content while material supporting Bolsonaro circulated more widely.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has denied favouring either candidate. The company blames technical errors for problems affecting some of Lula’s campaign advertisements, and says it mistakenly deactivated a number of them.

The court, however, was not convinced. It had earlier directed Meta to apply the same rules to both campaigns, including limits on unequal treatment through content recommendations, search results and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. In its latest ruling, it said the company had not provided enough evidence that it had complied.

As a result, the court doubled the daily penalty for noncompliance from approximately $100,000 to $200,000. It said the earlier fine had proved insufficient to secure compliance ahead of the decisive vote on October 25.

The dispute reaches beyond the courtroom. Lula’s campaign accuses Meta of limiting the reach of its political messages and applying inconsistent restrictions through WhatsApp’s AI features. Meta says the technical problems were not confined to Brazil.

Lula’s Workers’ Party has also taken its complaints abroad, submitting them to the Organization of American States and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression.

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Public pressure has followed. On Monday, dozens of Lula supporters demonstrated outside Meta’s offices in Sao Paulo, demanding greater transparency over how the company handles election-related content.

Bolsonaro’s campaign, for its part, has made a separate allegation. It accuses Lula’s supporters of running a negative online publicity campaign with Meta’s approval.

The stakes are high because the race is so close. Brazil is heading into a runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and recent opinion polls point to a statistical tie. That leaves the role of social media platforms under close scrutiny in the final days of campaigning.