Meta to cease promoting political advertisements within the EU from October

In response to the European Union’s incoming regulation of political promoting, Meta mentioned on Friday that it’ll cease promoting and displaying political advertisements within the EU from October.

Calling the laws’s necessities “unworkable,” the tech big wrote in a blog post that the regulation, dubbed Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA), introduces “vital, extra obligations to our processes and methods that create an untenable stage of complexity and authorized uncertainty for advertisers and platforms working within the EU.”

Adopted by the European Fee in 2024, the TTPA mandates corporations promoting advertisements to obviously label political commercials; present details about their sponsor, the election or referendum they concern, what the advert value, and what focusing on mechanisms had been used.

The regulation additionally requires that information collected to serve political advertisements should solely be used if the particular person or entity offers their consent to make use of it for political promoting, and bans the usage of some forms of private information, resembling data that would reveal an individual’s racial or ethnic origin or political beliefs, from getting used for profiling.

These necessities appear to be an excessive amount of for Meta, nonetheless, which derives the overwhelming majority of its revenues from promoting. The corporate mentioned it had consulted with the EU extensively, however got here to the conclusion that it will both have to change its providers to supply an advert service that “doesn’t work for advertisers or customers,” or cease providing such advertisements altogether.

“As soon as once more, we’re seeing regulatory obligations successfully take away in style services and products from the market, lowering alternative and competitors,” Meta wrote.

Google, one other promoting big that additionally said it will cease promoting political advertisements within the EU by October, raised comparable factors, arguing that the regulation brings vital operational challenges and authorized uncertainty.

That is the tv show of a string of tussles between the EU and Massive Tech because the bloc tries to rein within the affect and energy of those platforms. Tech corporations have been battling the EU’s AI Act, its enforcement of competition rules, ad-tracking regulation, and extra.