Brazil’s electoral court has told both campaigns to stop using it as a weapon, while it investigates one campaign’s complaint against a platform. The Superior Electoral Court, the TSE, warned representatives of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Senator Flavio Bolsonaro on Tuesday that the judicialisation of the electoral process risked restricting debate. The court has registered 162 legal challenges since the first round on October 4, more than triple the number in the same period before the 2022 elections, as each camp files censorship requests against what it calls the other’s online misinformation.
The largest single fight is over a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army, created by a pro Lula congressman with over 4 million followers. Bolsonaro supporters accuse it of spreading misinformation, including a claim that the senator would cut social benefits; Lula’s campaign denies the accusations, the president joked on Monday about creating a full set of armed forces channels, and the TSE has authorised the channel.
Running the other way is the incumbent’s complaint against Meta. Lula’s Workers’ Party denounced interference by the company after restrictions on some of its Instagram content, saying the president’s profile was prevented from promoting feed posts, that view counts on an official post were interrupted, and that before the first round his profile and those of other left leaders disappeared from Instagram search. The campaign says the pattern raises strong suspicions of interference benefiting Bolsonaro, and also complained that Google’s Gemini tool attributed false statements to the president. The TSE gave Meta 48 hours to clarify whether it reduced the reach of Lula campaign posts and to report, profile by profile, the measures applied to his accounts. Meta’s Brazil office denied the charges as simply false and unsupported by the facts, saying many of the technical issues were worldwide and not specific to Brazil or particular accounts, and the court has since sought further technical explanations from the company.
With the runoff on October 25 and Bolsonaro favoured after his narrow first round win, the institutional question is whether Brazil’s powerful electoral court can police platform behaviour in real time without itself becoming the campaigns’ main battleground. Status: court warning issued, Meta explanations demanded, no interference finding made.