The full bench of Brazil's Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE, the country's top electoral court) voted unanimously on Friday (16) to uphold an order barring Meta from restricting the reach of posts about the candidates for president. The order covers Facebook and requires the company to stop reducing the distribution of such content, excluding it from recommendations and limiting its appearance in search results. Noncompliance carries a daily fine of R$ 500,000.
The decision had been issued the day before, on 15 October, by Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze, who serves as an auxiliary judge at the court. In granting it, Bellizze described his own assessment as preliminary — an order to take effect immediately, before the merits of the case are examined.
What triggered the order
The campaign of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), who is running for re-election, brought the court a specific complaint: Meta's artificial-intelligence image prompts would not produce pictures of the president, while images of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), his runoff opponent, were allowed. The filing was about unequal treatment of the two candidacies, not about the censorship of any particular content.
That distinction matters for reading the order. What the TSE required was not the permission or prohibition of a subject, but symmetry. The court did not say which content the platform must distribute — it said the platform cannot distribute one candidate's content less than the other's.
How the bench voted
The vote to uphold was unanimous. Bellizze, who also filed a statement, was joined by Justices Floriano de Azevedo Marques, André Mendonça, Estela Aranha, Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva, Nunes Marques and Dias Toffoli.
What Meta said
The company said it had temporarily stopped recommending candidates and generating images of them, as the court required. "Em cumprimento com as regras eleitorais do Brasil" ("In compliance with Brazil's electoral rules"), its statement reads, the company "proibimos temporariamente a recomendação de candidatos" ("we have temporarily banned the recommendation of candidates"). Meta added that it had taken further steps so that prompts using only a candidate's first name or ballot number would not generate images either.
A tightening calendar
The order lands in the closing stretch of the campaign: the runoff is on 25 October. According to Agência Brasil, the restriction periods set out in the electoral calendar begin on 22 October — the window in which rulings on internet campaigning have less and less time to produce any practical effect before the vote.
With information from Agência Brasil and JOTA.
