Brazil's top electoral court has fined Facebook 7.5 million reais, about $1.34 million, for failing to fully obey judicial orders during last month's presidential election runoff campaign. The Superior Electoral Court, known as the TSE, reached the decision unanimously on Tuesday, but said there was no evidence so far that the company had deliberately acted to influence the result.

What the court found

The case centred on 17 measures ordered by reporting Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze on 15 October, designed to secure equal treatment for the two runoff campaigns. According to the ruling, Facebook submitted explanations and technical documents but replaced the deadlines set by the court with its own timetable, sent information in fragmented submissions and left some requirements only partly addressed. The court concluded that the platform had not adequately met the demands placed on it during the decisive weeks of the campaign.

The fine was calculated from daily penalties. It covers three days at 500,000 reais a day between 17 and 19 October, amounting to 1.5 million reais, and six days at one million reais a day between 20 and 25 October, totalling six million reais. The final day of that period, 25 October, was the day voters went to the polls for the runoff, in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unexpectedly secured re-election over right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

No finding of deliberate bias

Despite imposing the penalty, the court drew a clear line between failing to follow its orders and deliberately tilting the election. Justice Bellizze wrote that the records contained technical failures acknowledged by Facebook itself, but that there were no elements allowing the court to conclude, even on a preliminary basis, that there had been deliberate action to unbalance the election. The distinction matters: the judges held that a technology company can be penalised for falling short of judicial oversight intended to protect electoral equality, even without proof that it set out to manipulate the outcome.

The complaint behind the case

The proceedings began with a complaint from the Brasil Pronto Pra Mais coalition, which backed Lula's re-election. It alleged that Meta's platforms treated content from the two campaigns differently, restricting the distribution of its posts, failing to deal with purportedly inauthentic accounts, failing to identify AI-generated content and operating its tools unevenly between the rival camps. The case, registered as Representation No. 0602746-69.2026.6.00.0000, named Facebook Serviços Online do Brasil, Meta's Brazilian operating company, as the respondent.

The ruling lands as Brazil continues to grapple with the role of large online platforms in its elections. The TSE has repeatedly used urgent orders during campaigns to demand equal treatment of candidates and the removal of misleading material, and the fine is one of the most significant penalties it has imposed on a platform for non-compliance. Reuters reported the decision from São Paulo, and an independent account of the judgment by Bars Across confirmed the case number and the way the penalty was calculated.