Excessive caution with electoral closures generates a blackout of public data that compromises access to information

Some states announced the complete suspension of official websites and social networks until October 25th. In July 2026, Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) removed around 146 thousand journalistic articles from the air under the same justification. The result is a temporary data blackout that affects those who research, those who inform and those who depend on this information to work. What does the law actually prohibit? Electoral legislation prohibits, in the three months preceding the election, "institutional advertising of acts, programs, works, services and campaigns of public bodies", with the exception of advertising of products and services with competition in the market and cases of serious and urgent public need, as recognized by the Electoral Court. The objective is legitimate: to prevent the public machine from being used to promote government-candidates, which would break equality of opportunities between competitors. The central issue is the scope of the expression "institutional advertising", about which the TSE's jurisprudence is not uniform. A first guideline (TSE, AgR-AI nº 51,738), more restrictive and currently predominant, maintains that, during the prohibited period, any and all institutional advertising is prohibited, regardless of its informative, educational or socially oriented content, with only legal exceptions noted. A second interpretation (TSE, Rp nº 1,238) conditions the prohibition to the prior characterization of the content as institutional advertising, thus understanding the dissemination promoted, authorized and funded by the Public Power to praise acts and achievements of management. Therefore, the insertion of purely informative content on an official website "does not have the potential for propaganda" that the law prohibits. The divergence, however, is more apparent than real. Even a restrictive reading presupposes that we are, first of all, dealing with institutional advertising, a threshold that technical or scientific data, devoid of a promotional framework, does not exceed. Advertising is not synonymous with information. Merely informative and technical content cannot be confused with management promotion. The federal Executive Branch’s own guidelines for 2026 make this distinction. Both the booklet on prohibited conduct from the Attorney General's Office (AGU) and the booklet on electoral closures from the Secretariat of Social Communication (Secom) separate institutional advertising from information disclosed in compliance with the duties of active transparency. What they require is simply the adaptation of the pages: removal of names, symbols, slogans and elements of personal or governmental praise. In short: the law requires the advertising to be removed, not the data. The statistics on deforestation produced by Inpe are not, in themselves, institutional advertising. Neither is an epidemiological bulletin or a Regulatory Agency's public consultation report advertising. What may characterize electoral illegality is the promotional purpose that eventually accompanies this content. This should be the real scope of the legal restriction. Electronic ballot box Reproduction/TV Globo When excessive caution violates the law The indiscriminate removal of content results from an expansive interpretation driven more by the fear of sanctions than by the determination of the norm. When in doubt, the manager suppresses everything. This is the phenomenon, already identified in specialized literature, called "pen blackout". The phenomenon generates decision paralysis which consists of the refusal, hesitation or omission of public authorities and managers in making decisions. This inertia stems from corporate self-defense: the paralyzing fear of being held personally accountable. This caution has a legal and social cost. Law No. 12,527/2011 (Access to Information Law) establishes publicity as a general precept and secrecy as an exception. And it obliges public bodies to disclose, regardless of request, the information of collective interest they produce. Law No. 13,848/2019 (General Law of Regulatory Agencies) determines that public consultation reports remain available on the agencies' websites. Administrative transparency, finally, arises directly from the constitutional principle of publicity, provided for in article 37 of the Constitution of the Republic. There is no provision in electoral legislation that suspends these duties during the electoral period. The paradox is evident. To avoid conduct that potentially violates electoral law, public bodies begin to effectively violate general and specific legal duties of transparency that govern their actions. Applications from public bodies Reproduction The costs for science and public policies For scientific research