X switched on a piece of code named Brazil2026ElectionFilter on August 16, the opening day of Brazil's official campaign season. The filter keeps posts from candidates' registered accounts out of the For You feed of anyone who does not follow them. It deletes nothing, suspends no one, and leaves every post on the candidate's own profile, one search away. Sarah B. Rogers, the US under secretary of state for public diplomacy, called it "censorship."
The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) requires any provider that runs a recommendation system to remove candidate profiles and their content from algorithmic distribution. Paid amplification remains legal as long as buyers include the campaign's corporate tax number. Brazilian electoral doctrine treats campaign exposure as a rationed, accountable resource, and the court is unwilling to let a recommendation engine hand out unpriced airtime.
👉 Why it matters. The recommendation engine is not a neutral pipe. That is the premise Brazilian electoral law starts from.
Nature published an audit of 323 automated TikTok accounts during the 2024 US race that found Republican-seeded accounts were served roughly 11.5% more ideologically aligned content than Democratic-seeded accounts, a gap that engagement metrics could not explain. A parallel audit of 120 accounts on X found its recommendation system amplified right-leaning voices by default to users following nobody.
The filter is one fragment of a far larger compliance architecture. Messaging firms, major platforms, and even e-commerce firms filed election compliance plans with the court, an obligation that binds every provider with more than 5 million monthly active users in Brazil.
Chief Electoral Justice Kassio Nunes Marques trimmed the original draft in the platforms' favor: longer response windows, thinner operational disclosure, annual rather than monthly reporting, no external audit, and a clause allowing firms to refuse specific data on trade-secret or foreign-law grounds. The rules also reach AI. Chatbots may not recommend a vote, even when a user explicitly asks for one.
Rogers's post matters less as legal analysis than as diplomacy. It comes as Brazil-US relations sour, and officials in the Lula administration fear the US government could use its cozy ties to Big Tech to tilt algorithms toward Flávio Bolsonaro, the far-right senator who has pledged allegiance to Washington.
The Brazilian Report spoke with Judge Renata Gil, the TSE's international affairs director, about these rules. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Americans hear "electoral court regulates speech" and think censorship. What are you actually policing?
We are governed by two principles. The first is the dignity of the human person, which outranks every other principle — free expression has to live inside it. The second is that the vote be as free as possible: voluntary, conscious suffrage. When you obstruct that with deepfakes or AI-driven fake news, the court holds firm.
In the X case, you're telling a platform how to run its algorithm. Why is that the court's business?
The court is not asking that a candidate's posts be removed. It is asking that the algorithm not recommend them to users who don't follow that candidate. What is voluntary, what is not engineered, we leave alone. What is artificial has no place in a system of voluntary, universal suffrage.
A US State Department official called that censorship. How would you answer?
Under Brazilian constitutional rules, it is not censorship. Anyone who knows our Constitution knows this does not touch that freedom at any point. I've been a judge for 30 years, and I read it simply: if a company operates here and profits here, it has to know Brazilian law.
The TSE recently briefed foreign ambassadors on Brazil's electoral system. What are these delegations here to see?
Our voter roll — 150 million Brazilians registered with biometrics, no duplicates. The machine itself, which even an illiterate voter can use. And the people: 2,500 electoral judges, career magistrates who rotate every two years so they aren't captured by local politics. We open the source code and run integrity tests. This year the European Union, the Arab League and the African Union have all come to look. If the system were discredited, the world wouldn't be here.
