Spanish news giants pile into Meta’s legal nightmare

After the EU’s top court earlier this year sank Meta’s legal justifications for targeted advertising—which, for this company, is as essential as breathing—Meta abruptly made its EU users decide between paying over $10 a month to use Facebook and Instagram, and consenting to receive tracking-based ads.

Privacy advocates were the first to attack last week, complaining to the Austrian data protection authority about this “privacy fee” and arguing that the consent people were giving was coerced, and therefore illegal. Consumer advocates joined the fray two days later, complaining to consumer protection authorities that Meta was “breaching EU consumer law by using unfair, deceptive and aggressive practices, including partially blocking consumers from using the services to force them to take a decision quickly, and providing misleading and incomplete information in the process.”

And now we can add a competition suit to the list, courtesy of Big Spanish Media.

The AMI newspaper association today revealed a €550 million ($598 million) lawsuit against Meta, arguing that the U.S. Firm gained an unfair competitive advantage in the ad space by systematically breaking EU data protection law. As AMI president José Joly tells it, Meta’s indifference towards user consent threatens the media’s survival, and therefore democracy itself.

Spain’s media giants have form when it comes to successfully taking on Big Tech. Nearly a decade ago, they lobbied their government into passing a very restrictive ancillary copyright law that led Google to shut down Google News in the country for eight years—Google reopened the service last year following a legal reform that allowed for negotiations with publishers, as opposed to the mandatory payments that the law previously demanded.

So, that’s privacy law, consumer law, and competition law—is there any other angle from which Meta’s consent issue can possibly be attacked? National security? Food standards? Jokes aside, this legal smorgasbord neatly indicates how many aspects of our lives—and our rights—the online surveillance industry touches.

Separately, Meta and Harvard have been hit with a whistleblower disclosure from the prominent disinformation researcher Joan Donovan, who alleges her team at Harvard Kennedy School was shut down due to inappropriate influence from the company.

Donovan says the school axed the fully funded Technology and Social Change Research Project (TASC) and let her go after two years of trying to “silence” the team’s findings—all of which she links to the school’s relationship with Meta, and a $500 million pledge for Harvard’s AI institute from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Harvard Kennedy School strongly denied the allegations in comments to the Washington Post, insisting that “donors have no influence” over research there. I asked Meta for comment on this story and the Spanish suit but had received none by the time of publication. More news below.

David Meyer

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