President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's campaign has decided to take to the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), the body that oversees Brazil's elections, a suspected mass dissemination of videos and images about food prices, described as coordinated and inauthentic activity. The move was reported on Monday (24) by columnist Daniela Lima at UOL and picked up by outlets such as Brasil 247 and Diário do Centro do Mundo.
The survey prepared by Lula's Workers' Party (PT) lists more than 20 influencers and points to the use of identical scripts and image files in posts attacking the president. The suspicion is that profiles boosted by leaders of the Liberal Party (PL), the party of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula's main rival in the 2026 race and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, acted in a coordinated way to spread messages about the high cost of food.
Repeated script and one sirloin photo on 33 accounts
According to Diário do Centro do Mundo, the document the campaign plans to present to the electoral court argues that the similarities between the contents go beyond the topic of the videos. "It is the script. The same recording location, the same object in the frame, the same gesture and the same speech structure", the report says, noting that one structure appeared in seven posts by six profiles. A photograph of a piece of sirloin steak with the same barcode on the label circulated on 33 accounts; on June 25, three of them posted the file within six minutes and 23 seconds of each other.
The material also gathers nine cases in which content creators describe concrete benefits obtained after the posts, such as follower growth, personal access to politicians, status or physical improvements to their homes. A woman from Rio Grande do Norte says in one of the videos that she received a television after sharing her situation on social media: "I got this TV here because I went there to talk about the country's poverty, because I showed the poverty in my house on social media". The survey also cites three motions of congratulation filed by a PL city councilman on March 5, 2026, honoring three influencers on the list. Some of the influencers said on their own pages that they received donations from businessmen and pro-Bolsonaro channels after publishing attacks on the government.
On the other side, the PL has also gone to the TSE against profiles it accuses of spreading false and manipulated content against Flávio Bolsonaro. In one of the actions, the party pointed to 409 profiles that allegedly acted in coordination. The senator's office said the courts ordered account blocks and that Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, asked for more time to comply with the orders given the volume of material.
Content about supermarkets and food prices has become one of the main fronts of the online battle between the two camps, in a campaign where the cost of living is a central issue. It will be up to the electoral court to decide whether to open an investigation into the material presented by Lula's campaign.