The coalition "O Brasil Pronto pra Mais", which groups the Workers' Party and allies backing the reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, filed a case with Brazil's top electoral court, the TSE, on Sunday (20) asking it to revoke the registration of the presidential ticket led by Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the PL party in the October election. The filing, an electoral judicial investigation action known in Brazil as an AIJE, was assigned to minister Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva and also names the vice presidential candidate, federal deputy Alfredo Gaspar (PL), and congressman Mario Frias (PL), who is running for reelection.

According to the petition, as reported by Valor Econômico and a column by Matheus Leitão in Metrópoles, the three would have benefited from a network of Instagram support pages built around collabs, joint posts that appear on every co-author's feed and reach all their followers. The coalition's argument is that pairing campaign accounts with undeclared support pages let campaign material circulate beyond legal limits and sidestep the restrictions that the platform's recommendation systems place on electoral accounts.

Studies attached to the case measure the network's growth. In the snapshot dated September 7, researchers counted 508 unique publications, 492 of them collabs involving 324 accounts in 13 groups. By September 17, the total had risen to 1,826 collabs from 492 accounts, a 271.1% jump in ten days, and the nominal follower count of the accounts grew from 130.9 million to 147.4 million, a figure the researchers themselves say double-counts overlapping audiences. The study also found 74 accounts tied to candidacies or campaigns present in 207 of the first 492 collabs (42.1%), and in the update 68.6% of the posts reused exactly the same sets of co-authors.

The petition also raises monetization. According to Valor, the survey identified 11 accounts posting links to election-related products sold on Shopee, nine of them within a single cluster of the network, with a combined following of more than 10 million; InfoMoney, cited by Amazônia Online, counts 12 accounts. Products mentioned include a cap bearing the number 22. Metrópoles reports that the campaign finance filings of Flávio and Michelle Bolsonaro show zero under the line for "sales of goods". The official profile of Mario Frias appears in ten collabs of the first study, nine of them with the page @flaviobolsonaroapoio and six with @flaviobolsonaros2, both different from Flávio Bolsonaro's official account. Of all the mapped profiles, only @matheus_cambui appears in the database of 61,511 web addresses reported to the electoral courts.

As an urgent measure, the coalition asks the court to order Meta to preserve data from the profiles and the collabs, including registration records, access logs, metadata and the history of collab invitations and acceptances, and to suspend the sale links, under a daily fine of 50,000 reais. The action also requests documents from Meta and Shopee to identify who runs the accounts and the store and where the revenue went, plus information from the lower house and the Senate on staff, contracts and spending in the offices of Flávio, Alfredo Gaspar and Frias since February 1. On the merits, it asks the court to revoke the three candidacies and declare the respondents ineligible for eight years, on the grounds of misuse of the media and abuse of economic and political power. The coalition also wants the case sent to the prosecutor general for elections, to investigate the role of other candidates before the regional electoral courts.

What the studies concede

The accusations remain allegations at an early stage, with no conviction and no ruling on the merits. The studies attached to the case themselves acknowledge, as Valor reports, that the existence of the collabs does not by itself prove who controls the pages, whether money was paid or who commands the network: co-authorship shows only that a post was shared, while ownership, command and payment depend on further evidence. As of Monday (21), no public response from Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign had appeared in the reports consulted, and the TSE had not yet ruled on any of the requests. The case adds to a wave of reciprocal complaints between the two campaigns: on September 15, according to G1, Flávio's campaign asked the TSE to bar Lula from broadcasting live videos from the Alvorada presidential residence during the campaign.

Timeline

• August 26: a collab cited in the case gathers Frias's official profile, his news account @mariofrias_noticias, the profile @jorgeseifjunior and two Flávio Bolsonaro support pages, in a post in which Frias thanks supporters of his reelection bid.
• September 7: first cut of the survey identifies 492 collabs and 324 profiles.
• September 8 to 17: a new collection records 1,334 additional collabs; the network reaches 1,826 posts.
• September 20: the coalition files the AIJE at the TSE; the case goes to minister Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva.
• Next step: the rapporteur rules on the urgent requests, including Meta's data preservation. No date is set; the ruling on the merits comes later.