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Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court issued a direct warning to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flavio Bolsonaro on Tuesday, urging both presidential campaigns to halt their aggressive legal battles over social media content.
Following a record 162 legal challenges filed since the October 4 first-round election—more than triple the filings from 2022—court officials cautioned that excessive litigation threatens to restrict genuine political debate ahead of the October 25 runoff.
The court battle centres on accusations of online misinformation from both camps, with Flavio Bolsonaro—the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro and current runoff favourite—accusing Lula’s popular “Lula’s Army” WhatsApp channel of falsely claiming he would cut social benefits.
While Lula defended the 4-million-follower messaging channel as a cost-effective campaigning strategy and gained electoral court authorisation to operate it, his Workers’ Party simultaneously filed formal complaints alleging that Meta unfairly restricted its Instagram content.
In response to the party’s claims, Meta attributed the content restrictions to global technical glitches.
Meanwhile, Lula’s campaign raised additional concerns over artificial intelligence after Google’s Gemini tool misattributed statements to the incumbent president.
Despite historically refusing to use a mobile phone, Lula responded to his narrow first-round loss by actively courting high-profile social media influencers and labelling himself the “king of the selfie” to bolster his digital strategy before the final vote.
