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Brazil’s top electoral court has ordered Meta to treat President Lula da Silva and challenger Flávio Bolsonaro equally ahead of their runoff following accusations of algorithmic bias.

Getting into it: Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze ruled last week, after a complaint from Lula’s campaign, that Meta can’t limit the spread of political posts, restrict searches or take down content in ways that tilt the field toward either candidate, and must make sure its AI tool treats both campaigns the same, or face fines of about $98,700 a day.

Lula’s campaign pointed to posts with missing share buttons, frozen view counts and reduced reach, a one-hour block on Lula’s ad accounts days before the first round, and WhatsApp’s Meta AI refusing to generate images of Lula while making them of Bolsonaro. A day after the ruling, Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that internal messages showed Meta staff admitting that restrictions had hit Lula’s Instagram accounts and that the platform had been pushing Bolsonaro’s profile and WhatsApp channel to users, though engineers pinned it on technical breakdowns rather than intent.

A watchdog group, CTRL+Z, says it found 1,088 cases of restrictions on Meta’s platforms that disproportionately hit pro-Lula content, though one of its founders, a former WhatsApp executive, has publicly backed Lula.

In a statement, Meta said, “Brazilian voters deserve facts, not a political narrative constructed by combining unrelated technical issues. We do not suppress content to disadvantage any side, nor do we grant preferential treatment to any side.”

The company insists the problems came from global glitches, including one that froze view counts on Reels worldwide and also hit pro-Bolsonaro posts, as well as strict anti-fraud filters, and that a loophole briefly blocked Meta AI from making images of Lula. They did not explain why Bolsonaro’s accounts were recommended to users.

This all comes ahead of the Oct. 25 runoff after Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president, narrowly led Lula in the first round.