Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – Meta on Friday said it will be forced to ban political advertising on its platforms in the European Union from October because of rules the Facebook and Instagram owner called “unworkable”. The EU has a bolstered legal armoury to rein in Big Tech, against which Meta has hit out — with the support of US President Donald Trump’s administration.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been highly critical of European rules, accusing Brussels in January of “censorship” while this week the US State Department denounced the EU’s “Orwellian” regulation of social media. Against this uneasy backdrop, and with EU-US trade tensions sky-high, Meta announced that political, electoral, and social issue advertising will no longer be allowed from October in the bloc because of “unworkable requirements” under new rules.
“This is a difficult decision — one we’ve taken in response to the EU’s incoming Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation,” it said. “Unfortunately, the TTPA introduces significant, additional obligations to our processes and systems that create an untenable level of complexity and legal uncertainty for advertisers and platforms operating in the EU,” Meta added.
The tech giant stressed that its European users would still be able to post and debate about politics. The EU says its political advertising rules seek to increase transparency in online advertising after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, which came to light in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was a consulting firm that was found to have improperly accessed personal data from millions of Facebook users for targeted political advertising, particularly during the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.
The change is set to impact Meta’s flagship platforms Facebook and Instagram, as well as WhatsApp — which is largely ad-free but announced in June it would be introducing new advertising features in some parts of the app. Meta said it was “not the only company to have been forced into this position”. Google last year announced it would also prevent political advertising in the EU from October 2025 because of the “significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties”.
Meta and Brussels have locked horns on a series of issues — most recently over the firm’s “pay or consent” system regarding user data. The EU slapped a 200-million-euro ($235-million) fine in April after concluding Meta violated rules on the use of personal data on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg has previously equated EU fines against the company to tariffs. Facebook and Instagram also face investigations under the EU’s mammoth content moderation law known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Meta’s announcement comes as US officials ramp up their attacks on the DSA. The State Department took aim at the DSA on Tuesday as it accused European countries of convicting thousands of people “for the crime of criticizing their own governments,” without elaborating on the allegation. And the judiciary committee of the US House of Representatives on Friday described the EU law as a “foreign censorship threat” that forces “platforms to change content moderation policies that apply in the United States”.
“On paper, the DSA is bad. In practice, it is even worse,” the Republican-majority committee said in an interim report. Staunch Trump ally Jim Jordan, committee chair, will meet the EU’s digital chief, Henna Virkkunen, in Brussels on Monday. Jordan will be joined by other US Congress members in a bipartisan delegation, EU digital spokesman Thomas Regnier said. The European Commission rejected the censorship claims.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in the EU. And it is at the heart of our legislation, including the DSA,” Regnier said.
© 2024 AFP
