Justice Dias Toffoli, of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF), ruled on Tuesday (September 1) to release the digital campaign of Renan Santos, a presidential candidate of the Missão party. The ruling reverses restrictions he imposed on Sunday (August 30) at the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Brazil's top elections authority, which had frozen his online campaign, barred him from debates and blocked transfers from the public election fund.
Acting on a request from the candidate's defense, InfoMoney reported, Toffoli authorized electoral propaganda on every internet address already registered with the TSE, including the 16 profiles declared past the deadline and suspended over the weekend, G1 reported. He also allowed Santos to take part in debates on radio, television, podcasts and other media, and restored his access to the Fundo Eleitoral, the public money that finances Brazilian campaigns, including funds already transferred. Digital platforms had two hours to restore the candidate's profiles.
The relief keeps controls in place. The profiles remain excluded from the platforms' content recommendation systems, and providers must reactivate the accounts registered in Divulgacand, the TSE's official campaign database, while keeping precautionary copies of access records, on pain of a 10,000-real fine per hour per profile, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Santos has 72 hours to say when each profile was created and when it began to be used for electoral purposes, and to declare any other accounts. The Electoral Prosecutor General's office must respond within 24 hours and assess possible electoral and criminal violations. Failure to comply can lead to the denial of his candidacy registration, according to InfoMoney.
Why the campaign had been suspended
The restrictions were imposed on Sunday after Santos disclosed to the TSE that 16 social media profiles were linked to his campaign, 12 days past the deadline. When he filed his candidacy, the businessman, a founder of the free-market activist group Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) and a first-time candidate, had declared only a website and one X account. TSE rules require candidates to register every campaign account and order platforms to pull those accounts from recommendation algorithms. According to Folha, the suspension came after the newspaper revealed the omission, which left the undeclared profiles open to algorithmic reach, unlike those of his rivals. On Tuesday, Meta and TikTok told the TSE they had removed the accounts cited in Sunday's ruling.
Toffoli wrote that Sunday's measures had a precautionary purpose, to preserve information and support the review of the candidacy registration, and that the TSE's technical staff had produced more than 1,000 pages of screenshots of the candidate's networks. In Tuesday's decision, he also stated that the "intentional or late omission" of the accounts amounts to evidence of fraud, InfoMoney reported.
Minutes before the new ruling, Santos attacked the suspension at a news conference and linked the restrictions to his criticism of figures involved in the Banco Master case. He said he did not believe the timing was a coincidence, and told his lawyers to skip a meeting at Toffoli's office that his own defense had requested. "We will not meet, and we will not give in on anything we said, on anything we did," he declared. His candidacy registration remains pending at the TSE: the candidate has 72 hours to deliver the required information, and the prosecutor general's office has 24 hours to respond.