The Spanish press has achieved a resounding victory against Meta, the group that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Madrid’s Commercial Court Number 15 ruled that the company violated data protection law to gain a competitive advantage in selling personalized programmatic advertising, following a lawsuit brought by 80 Spanish newspapers, including EL PAÍS, grouped in the Association of Information Media (AMI). Meta will have to pay these media 542 million euros, including interest.
This is a condemnation that helps correct the imbalance of power between social media platforms and the media. Judge Teodoro Ladrón Roda ensures that Meta used the data of millions of users “on a legal basis that did not allow this use of data and that makes the data processing carried out by Meta illegal”, which penalized the media with which it competes for advertising. online. The American company, whose European headquarters is located in Dublin, illegally used the data of its users without their explicit consent, which is against the law and implies unfair competition in the advertising market. As the media reported, Meta was thus able to increase its personalized, segmented and behavioral advertising business “far beyond its competitors”.
There are multiple fronts opened for Meta by the media. A similar lawsuit brought by television and radio associations Uteca and AERC seeks 160 million euros from the company for the same reason. In France, fifty newspapers have filed a similar lawsuit. Meta also clashed with Brussels: the European Commission fined Meta almost 800 million in 2024 for abuse of a dominant position; Last April it imposed another 200 million fine for violating the digital services law; and a process has been open since October to make it difficult for users to report illegal content.
The relationship between Internet giants and the media has led to tensions in several areas, from sudden changes in algorithms to the desire to relegate journalistic content over others. In this case, large platforms using their users’ data without their knowledge or consent constitutes a clear violation of European data protection law. Meta has around 3.5 billion users, which is equivalent to 40% of the world’s population and comes with a lot of responsibility. His enormous influence, stock market value and proximity to the White House cannot imply impunity. The sentence shared by the Spanish press is just a further step in the response that the abusive practices of big technologies deserve.
