Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court ruled on Sept. 30 to uphold the removal of false social media posts linking conservative Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, a Liberal Party candidate for president, to an alleged initiative to strip Our Lady of Aparecida of her title as the patroness of Brazil.
Under the decision reached in the virtual plenary session, content clearly linking Bolsonaro to the initiative must be removed. However, posts where there is reasonable doubt regarding the link to the candidate are to be preserved. This applies to a post by comedian Antonio Tabet, which was permitted to remain online by the reporting justice, André Mendonça.
The case began on Sept. 24 when Tabet posted an image of the dark-skinned Our Lady of Aparecida on X with the caption: “The militia family hates black women so much that they decided to attack Our Lady of Aparecida.” The post did not mention Bolsonaro by name. The senator is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who was president of Brazil from 2019-2023.
The following day, Mendonça, the vice president of the Superior Electoral Court and the rapporteur for the case, ordered the removal of content that claimed Bolsonaro or his family intended to strip Our Lady of Aparecida of her title as the patroness of Brazil.
Upon reconsidering his vote, the judge concluded there was doubt regarding the link between Tabet’s post and Bolsonaro and decided to allow the post to stay online.
“As it is reasonable to take the content to be ambiguous, I believe the solution most consistent with the criteria of minimal intervention [by the courts] and heightened protection of freedom of expression is to keep the post online,” Mendonça said.
According to the judge, the decisions ordering the removal of the content specifically naming Flávio Bolsonaro “do not amount to prior restraint” nor did they violate religious freedom.
“Confusing a ‘fake news’ report with a restriction on faith represents a distortion of the decision’s actual substance. Faith was not on trial,” Mendonça said. He further noted that “the insinuation that the decisions issued in these proceedings sought to prevent Catholics from expressing support for or devotion to Our Lady of Aparecida is particularly baffling” and emphasized: “Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the decisions warrants such a conclusion.”
He also stated that this change does not alter the other points of his decision and emphasized that he considers “objectively false” the claims that Bolsonaro “had authored, presented, proposed, supported, or concretely orchestrated an initiative aimed at removing Our Lady of Aparecida from her status as the patroness of Brazil.”
The president of the Supreme Electoral Court, Justice Nunes Marques, concurred with Mendonça and stated that the decision “protects religious freedom in its collective and democratic dimension.”
“In my view, the relief granted protects religious freedom in its collective and democratic dimension, as it prevents the faith of millions of Brazilians from being instrumentalized within days of the election [Oct. 4] through a claim without a factual basis designed to artificially stir up emotional reactions among the electorate,” Marques said.
He also highlighted that “the contested post did not need to name the candidate to attribute the claim to him; because it was disseminated at the height of the false narrativeʼs circulation — accompanied by the image of the patroness. Its message was only fully realized and achieved its intended effect due to the context of current news stories in which it was embedded.” Nevertheless, Marques’ difference of opinion regarding Tabet does not alter the effect of the ruling.
This story was first published by ACI Digital, the Portuguese-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
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