RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil’s top electoral court fined Meta’s Facebook US$1.3mil (RM5.3mil) for failing to fully comply with judicial orders during last month’s presidential election runoff campaign when the company was accused of political bias by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s team.
Justices ruled late Tuesday (Nov 10) that Facebook had failed to adequately meet court demands related to allegations that its platform treated content from Lula and challenger Flávio Bolsonaro differently but said there was no evidence so far that the company attempted to influence the election’s outcome.
"Such a conclusion would require compelling evidence of intent, to be presented in full proceedings through the appropriate legal channels,” Justice Marco Aurélio Bellizze said in his decision that was unanimously accepted by his colleagues.
Ahead of the runoff vote, Lula’s campaign filed a lawsuit claiming that the company owning Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp was using biased algorithms and AI restrictions to favour Bolsonaro.
The accusation gained traction among Lula's supporters and sparked a protest in front of Meta's offices in Sao Paulo.
Meta said in response that a series of recent platform issues stemmed from unrelated global technical glitches, strict anti-fraud measures and regulatory compliance rather than targeted suppression. The tech giant also told the court that it had adopted measures to ensure equal treatment of the two campaigns.
But Bellizze said that while the company had submitted statements and documents regarding the measures, some court orders were not followed or were fulfilled incompletely or late.
The fine of 7.5mil reais (US$1.3mil or RM5.3mil) relates to the "conduct of the defendant in relation to the court order as a whole, considering, in particular, the delays, incomplete information and the difficulty verifying certain data,” according to a statement on the decision by the country’s top electoral court.
The amount corresponds to three days of fines of 500,000 reais (US$90,000 or RM367,470) between Oct 17 and Oct 19 and six days of fines of 1mil reais (US$180,000 or RM734,940) between Oct 20 and Oct 25, the statement added.
In an updated statement on Nov 9 before the ruling, Meta again denied accusations of political bias. It said it applied "the same rules to every candidate, every party, and every political viewpoint in Brazil, as we do in elections around the world.”
Lula bested Bolsonaro in the runoff vote by more than 4.4 million votes after having trailed in the first round, a turnaround analysts attribute to a huge mobilisation of Lula’s supporters both online and in the streets. – AP
