The massive blow to Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg giant, came after the Irish Data Protection Commission found systematic violations of the European privacy regulation, resulting in the largest fine ever imposed on a high-tech entity in Europe: a whopping 1.2 billion euros. The illegal activity, which Meta is expected to cease within six months, involves the transfer of European users’ data from the company’s social platforms to servers located in the United States. It may seem like a marginal issue, but it affects the core business of social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which thrive commercially by accumulating, transferring, and selling user data for advertising purposes—data that users “donate” to them, more or less knowingly. This mass of data encompasses every aspect of people’s private lives, from culinary tastes to political ideas. Such detailed and extensive information has never been collected before, let alone at such a scale, without spending a dollar and yielding significant profits.
The dispute between the Commission and the social media giants dates back a few years, when, for the first time, after Edward Snowden’s revelations, discussions began about data transfers to the US and the subsequent use by Washington’s intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, the United States has declared war on the Chinese giant Huawei, suspecting it of carrying out a similar operation: collecting data from Americans using their devices and making it accessible to Chinese authorities. This has been the revolution that social media brought to the world of espionage: rather than investigating to obtain specific data on individuals or societies they intend to monitor, today it is enough to navigate through a massive amount of data, searching for what these individuals willingly share online.
There is also the issue of increasingly targeted advertising, tailored to our tastes and preferences, which is already being heralded as another area for artificial intelligence to land. Not to mention the mechanisms these companies have devised to pay minimal taxes, if any at all, despite their immense profits. It is almost paradoxical that Ireland, a key player in the “legal evasion” strategy devised at the European level by high-tech giants, is now the country tasked with imposing this massive blow on Meta. However, it is also inevitable, considering that Ireland hosts the company’s European headquarters.
This matter will continue in the courts as long as the negotiation between Washington and Brussels on data treatment, which is regulated differently on both sides of the Atlantic, persists. Given the mistake made by betting on the commercial success of the metaverse, which is still struggling, Meta will now focus on cost reduction and advertising revenue on social networks. Advertising revenue has already exponentially increased on Facebook to the point of driving many users away due to targeted advertising bombardment.
For the industry, this is a growth crisis in the sense that social media platforms like Facebook have nearly exhausted their potential user base, and there is always a new competitor, as seen with TikTok, eroding their established position over the years. In any case, these are not easy times for those who promised a revolution in the history of human communication and, in the end, offer us a “new media” infested with advertisements. Perhaps, more than new, this world is already old, worn out as quickly as social media ages news. And perhaps we are ready for something new, which we still do not know.
alfredosomoza 