The presidential campaign of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, has internally conceded that Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) is likely to fully ban AI-generated content simulating candidates in political advertising. According to Folha de S.Paulo's Painel column, the campaign team has "thrown in the towel" on the issue and now views a full veto as the most probable outcome of the court's review of AI rules for the 2026 elections.
A TSE resolution issued earlier this year prohibits the use, to harm or favor a candidacy, of synthetic content in audio, video or a combination of both, generated or digitally manipulated, "even with authorization", to create, replace or alter the image or voice of a living, deceased or fictitious person. Campaign strategists had held out hope that positive uses of AI technology might be cleared by the court, a scenario Flávio's team now considers unlikely, according to Folha.
A proposed rule on deepfakes
The debate took on new urgency on Tuesday (25), when Supreme Court Justice André Mendonça, sitting on the electoral court, proposed a legal thesis to define what constitutes a deepfake. In Mendonça's view, the ban should apply when synthetic audio or video shows "a degree of realism or verisimilitude objectively capable of producing a false perception of authenticity", meaning it could fool voters into believing it is genuine, according to G1. If adopted, the rule would help judges separate illegal deepfakes from memes, caricatures, animations and other obviously fanciful representations made with AI.
Mendonça also stressed that adding a label declaring that content was generated by AI does not make lawful any material that meets the deepfake criteria, which remains subject to strict prohibition. He argued that a clear standard is necessary given the importance of the issue and the expectation of repeated disputes during the 2026 campaign.
The proposed thesis came in a decision that granted a request from Flávio Bolsonaro's own campaign, ordering the removal of an AI-generated video. The video linked the senator to former banker Daniel Vorcaro, who was preventively arrested in Operation Compliance Zero, and alleged financial kickbacks from a "rachadinha", a scheme in which politicians pocket parts of their employees' public salaries. Mendonça preliminarily ruled the video was a deepfake lacking mandatory AI disclosures, restricting his decision to removing that specific piece.