Top Brazilian Court Fines Meta $200k Per Day Over ‘Election Bias’

Brazil’s top electoral court has said it will fine Meta $200,000 a day until it can prove that president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his far-right challenger Flávio Bolsonaro get equal treatment on its platforms.

Last week, a judge at Brazil’s top electoral court ruled that Meta had to adopt measures to ensure that both candidates receive equal treatment, or face a daily fine of the equivalent of 500,000 reais ($100,000). 

This court doubled the fine on Monday, saying the social media giant failed to comply with the first order.

President Lula has said Meta restricted his posts in the run-up to the elections first round vote earlier this month and is still doing so ahead of the run-off election on Sunday.

Meanwhile, rightwing disinformation about the election has spread widely on the platform, according to Amnesty International and others. 

“The scenario is that of a platform illegally practicing algorithmic selectivity, in the midst of a fierce presidential contest,’ Lula’s campaign said,

Meta has said the allegations are “false and unfounded” and blamed “technical incidents” that affected “different parts of the political spectrum”, rather than just Lula’s campaign.

Lula has also accused the US of meddling in the election, saying president Donald Trump wants to “colonise” the country. In July, Trump hit Brazil with a 25% trade tariff, after meeting with Bolsonaro, a move seen as an attempt to hurt Lula’s chances.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Meta’s Sao Paulo headquarters over the weekend in an action organised by the group Não Se Meta.

Instagram employees have admitted in internal communications that the company’s algorithm, which decides what its users see, favoured Bolsonaro, according to a report by Brazilian news outlet Folha de Sao Paulo.

Meta has a huge presence in Brazil, with more than 113 million Instagram users in the country as of 2024. 

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Lula is a close second in the polls, behind the son of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was jailed for 27 years in 2025 for attempting to stage a military coup to remove Lula from office. 

Bolsonaro came out on top in the first round voting earlier this month.