Over 80 Spanish Media Organisations File $600Million Suit Against Facebook Owner, Meta

Over 80 Spanish media organisations have begun plans to initiate a $600 million lawsuit against Meta over alleged unfair competition in a case that could be repeated across the European Union.

Meta is formerly the Facebook company that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services.

According to VOA, the legal action which was filed in a commercial court in Madrid by the media companies will be the latest front in a battle by legacy media against the dominance of tech giants at a time when the traditional media industry is in economic decline.

The complaint was filed by a group of media organisations in Spain called the Association of Media of Information (AMI), which claimed that Meta had broken EU data protection regulations from 2018 to 2023.

The action is also another attempt by media organisations to seek compensation from internet and social media platforms for the use of their content.

The legal battle comes as the Reuters Institute’s 2023 Digital News Report found that tech platforms like Meta and Google had become a “running sore” for news publishers over the past decade.

The newspapers argue that Meta’s “massive” and “systematic” use of its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms gives it an unfair advantage of designing and offering personalized advertisements, which they say constitutes unfair competition.

Irene Lanzaco, director general of AMI, told VOA it estimated the actions of Meta had cost Spanish newspapers and magazines $539.2 million in lost income between 2018 and 2023.

“This loss of income has meant it is more difficult for the media to practise journalism, to pay its journalists, to mount investigations and to hold politicians to account for corruption,” she was quoted by VOA.

“It means that society becomes more polarized, and people become less involved with their communities if they do not know what is going on,” she added.

Until now, traditional media cases against Silicon Valley centred on the theft of intellectual property from the news business, but the Spanish suit made a claim related to alleged theft of personal data.

“Previously, all the cases that legacy media has brought have been about the piracy of intellectual property — ‘We report the news, and these people are putting it on their websites without paying for it,’” Kathy Kiely, the Lee Hills chair in Free Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, told VOA.

“But what this case is about is that these social media platforms have access to a lot of information about the audience to gain unfair advantage in advertising,” she said.

While reacting, Matt Pollard, a spokesman for Meta Platforms, declined to comment because the company has not received the court documents on the action.

The Meta official was quoted by VOA saying: “We have not received the legal papers on this case, so we cannot comment. All we know about it is what we have read in the media.”

The complainants include Prisa, which publishes Spain’s left-wing daily El País; Vocento, owner of ABC, a right-wing daily; and the Barcelona-based conservative daily La Vanguardia.

They claim that Meta used personal data obtained without the express consent from clients in violation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation in force since May 2018, which demands that any website requests authorization to keep and use personal data.