On December 4, 2023 a great development in the world of technology took place when a Spanish media filed a case against Meta. The owner of Facebook Meta platform will face a trial in October 2025 in Spain. 80+ media companies complain about Meta. The companies filed a lawsuit of 551 million euro ($582 million) claiming unfair competition in advertising.
The hearing of the court will be held on October 1 and 2. The 15th Madrid commercial court in their official statement says, ”The AMI media association, which represents 87 spanish firms filed a case last year claiming Meta violated EU data protection rules between 2018 and 2023”.
The newspaper claims that the huge and organized use of personal data of Meta platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp give biased advantages in designing and providing personalized ads. They bring an uneven and biased competition.
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The spokesperson of Meta has not immediately responded to the allegations.
The newspaper publishers such as Pirsa who is the owner of El Pais newspaper and Vocento who is the owner of ABC Newspaper, are involved in filing a case.
Apart from that, Spanish TV and radio broadcasters associations UTECA and AERC claimed that last month they had filed a 160 million euro lawsuit against Meta on the same ground.
The Spanish suits will represent efforts by legacy media to fight tech giants in both courts and legislature to preserve their revenue. Debating with these types of companies should pay fair fees for using and sharing content.
Some of these attempts have been backfired in some countries such as Canada and Australia where Meta has blocked their users from reposting news articles.
In its other markets, Meta has been scaling back its promotion of news and political content to bring traffic and says news links now represent only a fraction of users’ feed.
($1=0.9471 euros)
Credit to Thomson Reuters.
