TSE Orders Nikolas Ferreira to Delete Post Criticizing Lula’s “Touch From a Young Age” Remark
By Hotspotnews
TSE Justice Estela Aranha on Wednesday (September 30) ordered federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG) to delete, within 24 hours, an X post linking President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s comment about medical exams to a sexual reading involving children and adolescents. The injunction also bars him from republishing the same material or “substantially identical” content. X was notified to take the post down on the same deadline. The ruling is preliminary and can still go to the full court.
Lula spoke in Belém on September 28 about prostate-cancer screening and men’s resistance to the digital rectal exam. He said men do not like to “take the touch,” while “a woman learns to take the touch from a young age.” The line mixed a gynecological exam, routine care, and childhood. The wording was clumsy. That is the opening Nikolas used.
In the video, Ferreira said girls are not “touched from early on” and asked how a pedophile would hear the president’s sentence. He also cited a ChatGPT-based check on the typical age of such exams. Lula’s coalition, Brasil Pronto Pra Mais, went to the TSE alleging electoral disinformation, damage to honor, and illegal negative propaganda.
Aranha accepted the original health-care context but ruled that Ferreira introduced “an entirely different connotation,” moving the debate from public health to crimes under the Penal Code and the Child and Adolescent Statute. In her view, electoral disinformation does not require a fabricated lie; distortion in how a fact is framed can be enough. The deputy’s large audience counted against him.
The political fight around the clip was already ugly. Lula called Ferreira a scoundrel and an imbecile. First lady Janja called him a “piece of crap kid” and said he still needed to “eat a lot of beans” before matching the president. Ferreira answered at a rally in Minas Gerais: the real scoundrel, he said, is the man once jailed for corruption, the one who shakes hands with dictators, the one who has promised to change the country for 20 years.
The conservative point is straightforward. The president’s phrasing was reckless. Pointing that out, and pointing to the worst possible reading, is political speech. Treating it as induction to crime lets the electoral court decide which comments about the incumbent are allowed in the middle of the 2026 campaign. That is not only “fighting disinformation.” It is speech control with a deadline.
Ferreira has been hit by TSE orders before, including fines and a forced right of reply in 2022. The pattern is familiar: the court moves fast against opposition clips and treats the government’s original words as sacred context.
Sources: preliminary ruling by Justice Estela Aranha (TSE, Sept. 30, 2026); reporting by Estadão, CNN Brasil, Gazeta do Povo, CBN, Terra, and Jornal da Cidade Online.
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