The article doesn't mention this, of course, but Meta prohibits "socially sensitive" advertising due to the EU's TTPA law, or "Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising."
It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.
Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.
This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.
That’s not true, you’re repeating the exact same wrong statement that has been said multiple times in the comments. The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be. There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything. It’s very clearly a Meta problem, they are the ones deciding to make a blanket ban on ads for social issues (or at least say they are doing it, in practice that doesn’t seem to be the case, we don’t have a lack of such advertising in the EU)
> There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything.
They didn't claim that. Many EU regulations don't actually ban the thing, but make it more expensive, cumbersome, risky, etc... This has a similar effect as censorship, but doesn't imply there is some law that say "it is illegal to say X".
I did not say the EU forces Meta to ban it; perhaps you should re-read the comment.
It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.
You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).
The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.
I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.
The concern is not that you make a mistake. The concern is that you absolutely cannot trust a significant portion of the advertisers who would be your market for these ads, and who would cheerfully hammer you with attempts to get around compliance until they succeed.
These are also the folks this law is actually aimed at. So mission accomplished...
They didn’t claim the EU regulations forced Meta to ban anything. They claimed Meta decided “the juice is not worth the squeeze” when it comes to compliance. I don’t know who’s right to be fair, but I haven’t heard about any other instances of this with Meta, have you? What is it about this particular case? Never heard of this happening in the US. Possibly just an isolated incident blown out of proportion?
> liable and designed to influence the outcome of an election or referendum, voting behaviour or a legislative or regulatory process, at Union, national, regional or local level
Now, we all agree feminism is an important civil rights topic and Virginia Woolf should be (and is) celebrated in the western world. But how can a platform that is explicitly not allowed to permit advertising for political or social causes be allowed to run paid ads about "feminism" especially while Equal Pay for Equal Work is such a hot-button political issue [1] all over Europe?
So on the one hand we have the EU saying that no political or cause-centric advertising is permitted, and on the other hand the regulation is so overly broad that it is left up to everyone else to "figure it out".
As a result, and as we see here, most social media has just chosen to ban it all completely.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. The EU gets to choose their rules and Meta gets to make business decisions about how to comply with those rules. One can complain about either, I suppose.
I don’t know how the cost-benefit analysis happened within Meta when considering approaches but presumably they would rather be getting paid to show more ads rather than not being paid. Their policies may also change over time as they invest more in their systems or if the rules change.
Ultimately it seems to me like the real problem was that the advertiser in this case was quite tiny and the representative they spoke to perhaps didn’t do a great job of explaining the issue (and the customer was too insignificant to justify a more high-touch approach). Presumably if you’re paying a lot more for advertising you can get better treatment and perhaps Meta would also appropriately label political ads if you were wanting to spend a lot on them.
> The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be.
This doesn't sound like a good thing. Why shouldn't a political group be able to target people who are going to care the most about an issue/politician with an ad? Basically Meta has too good of a profile, so they aren't able to target ads. I would want to know personally, if Politician X is for/against a policy I feel strongly about.
This is to prevent bubbles, extreme polarization, and psychological manipulation. The goal is to prevent another Cambridge Analytica.
Also if you think about it, it would be bad if different people saw completely different political ads. Party could
"promise" one thing to some people, and completely contradictory thing to other people. Since people would live in their tight bubbles, most of them wouldn't notice. And this ("dark ads") is something that is definitely technically possible right now.
I doubt it's the bureaucratic cost (the Transparency part), because Meta can devolve most of it onto advertisers, and with their solution they still have the bureaucratic cost of preventing political ads from being served at all.
But there's also the Targeting part, which prohibits using people's personal data for targeting political ads unless they explicitly opted in. Meta describes this as "people seeing less relevant ads on our platforms." https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral... Of course people seeing ads intended for other demographic groups is precisely the point, to force political actors to present a coherent image of themselves to the public.
The same requirements apply to traditional billboard and newspaper ads, but since those can't do microtargeting by design, they don't lose value as a result in the way Meta ads do.
>Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all
Obviously, Meta's most important revenue stream comes from scam advertisements, so all other ads are expendable.
As far as I know, political ads just must be labelled as such and there are some other small restrictions. Definitely not something that is hard for meta to implement, if they wanted to. But I admit that fines are very severe (up to 6% of annual turnover, in theory), so I see why they don't want to risk it.
Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.
Folks want Facebook or whatever to be regulated into some perfect idea they have in their heads of how it should work and how it should be regulated. Sorry, many people have many views on that, and you're never going to be happy with an outcome. Even this article - Facebook is complying with EU rules/regulations and now you're not happy that your voice isn't heard through your preferred form of political activism. If Facebook allows this content, they break EU laws, or they have to allow some content you disagree with and now you're mad.
I don't know why people, right, left, or sideways keep putting up with this stuff.
>I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit
There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement. While I am a person who doesn't use those services (and recently stopped using reddit), a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.
Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them.
Individual boycotts rarely work, even ones that attract attention from a good number of people, companies are better at waiting than individuals seem to be. Political action has a much higher likelihood of success when driven by smaller motivated groups.
> There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement.
Good, I am pro-privilege and support being privileged. I'm not sure how and why we came to the point in our society where if someone says "hey these products suck and I'm not going to use them", someone has to come along and attempt to guilt them into using them? You want me to create a Facebook account and post pictures of funny cats because Joe and Sally podcaster need eyeballs for their rage-bait podcasts or quirky coffee mug they drop-shipped from China?
Sorry, not buying it. Don't like the products? Stop using them. Reliant on them? Go complain to regulators. Not my monkeys, not my circus.
For many, it is less silly cat pictures and more listing products for sale from a legitimate registered business (catering is a common one for example). Gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. If you do not take advantage of tools afforded to you, someone will and because social media like facebook is "free," that is a go-to.
I live in a community (outside USA) where it is common to advertise offline or alternative outlets.
There's no dependence "because others do". That is just defeatism. If people choose en masse to change their habits, the world has to follow suit, imho.
This is nearly saying "If people stop murdering each other we won't have murder any more". Well, yea no shit, a tautology is a tautology. The question is how do you elicit social change in an environment that is actively fighting back against you doing so and has a massive amount more information than you do.
One of the key points here is you live outside the US so it's much more likely that your communities are far less digitally integrated and have a much different history of social change and dynamics. For example car culture presents an absolutely massive amount of friction to social change. It literally physically separates us at much larger distances than states that do not have car culture. There is also the fact the modern social media swept over the US first drawing in most of the population long before we recognized the dangers of it. Government agencies and businesses moved a healthy amount of their communications to things like social media platforms. The network effects are powerful.
The next thing I'd like you to do is get on social media where all these people you want to change are and tell them to get off.... oooh, your account was banned. These companies are organisms that will fight back against what your trying. You forget the tobacco companies fought in the US for 30+ years inventing entirely new methods of propaganda before we developed laws to protect the rest of us against smoke in public.
You are not talking about a choice. You are talking about a war that is actively being fought.
Counter-counterproposal, ban influencers without attempting to ban advertising triggering an immune response from a multi-hundred billion dollar a year industry.
> a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.
You mean 'influencers'?
Nothing of value has been lost.
> Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them
Please can you provide an example. I can't say I've ever experienced such a thing (and would never GDPR opt-in to such data sharing even if the opportunity was there).
While, yes, influences of course use social media, most companies have realized having a social media presence is important today. I would be interested to see stats on how beneficial social media has been to, say, Wendy's.
Yea, I think among a fair portion of HN there is a misunderstanding of how economically connected social media is to businesses and people. For example Meta is one of the largest advertising agencies on earth.
My wife for example has a $200k+ job that involves a whole lot of interaction with social media. For her that would mean ending her job and moving on to god knows what, but probably not anything that pays near as well.
And then you come to the people that represent her customers. They make 70%+ of their income advertising services either on line or social media platforms.
So you end up in a race conditions. These people can't quit social media in one way or another or they stop eating. The customers have to move somewhere else first to redistribute the power the companies hold over those needing to advertise. Mostly what we see is not people quitting social media, but just moving to another social media platform shifting the problem. But also, because these people are advertising and doing tangentially related things on social media it brings their users to social media to get information.
I mean it's also the same thing we're starting to see with programmers and AI too, which is highly ironic after tall the "lrn 2 code" stuff that was posted online around that time.
If a programmer says I'm not going to use AI and the company says use AI, the programmer can absolutely walk, but god, I would not want to try to find a new job right now.
This is why things like unions and consumers pushing for consumer protection laws are fought by companies so hard. They are far more effective than individual actions because the incentives are against individual success.
If your business requires the use of one of these platforms in order to exist I would question its viability. Willingly giving a single company that much power over you is a horrible position to be in. Maybe it does put food on the table this month, great! But what happens if Zuck (or a piece of dumb automation) decides next month to boot you?
Yes it does. You're using the product and seeing the ad. You and others are mad that the product is complying with the regulation in a way you don't prefer. Stop using the product, and no ad is there to be seen and none of this matters.
> When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.
That’s Meta response. There is no mention of any regulation in that article.
Just because The Guardian intentionally didn't mention the regulations or role they might play and you want to be pedantic about their existence doesn't mean there aren't any.
Businesses are allowed to and routinely comply with regulations to their best ability even if it wasn't as intended based on the act of the regulator/government.
It wasn't in the article. Ok we can move past that now.
You can ban something by requiring excessive compliance with a regulation that is unobtainable or very unprofitable. The Guardian failed to even mention the regulation or what may have motivated Meta's actions.
Meta go one further and literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event in their own published guidelines on Slide - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - as eligible to run in the EU.
This was either an automated filter set to 'anti-woke' or some childish attempt at malicious compliance, or both. Thousands of such plays are advertised on numerous platforms across Europe every year without incident or comment.
That's Meta's response to advertising rules that they find too onerous. Governments keep trying to regulate businesses to appease the voters, sometimes they go too far and the business decides the sensible thing is to leave the market.
This is especially an issue with insurance in disaster prone areas. Insurance company comes along and notices that in the east it's houses very close to the beach (hurricanes/storm surge), in California it's wildfires. Insurance companies raise the premiums in such areas to reflect the risk, the people living there scream. The state does things that mandate spreading the risk--now the dangerous behavior continues but others pay the cost. And those others start screaming because they are paying insurance rates way above the value delivered. And sometimes we insurance companies simply pull up stakes and leave--and we see states responding by saying if you want to do any business in the state you'll provide the homeowner's insurance at a "fair" (not fair, it's a price they're losing money on) rate. I'm not aware of any insurance companies completely leaving a state yet.
We have seen this with malpractice insurance for doctors, though. The biggest carrier simply quit and the market went crazy. Locally we had doctors who would pay more for malpractice insurance for delivering a baby than the insurance payment for delivering said baby.
So how exactly is an ad for a play by an author who died 85 years ago political and requiring regulation? A person who died so long ago that, even in the EU with its onerous copyright regime, her work is in the public domain!?
It is a general thing that people only want to ban or regulate things that are against the social standards of their political organization, feminism and civil rights are two things that are pretty central to the EU. I know they must be, because I always read American right-wing commentators say about how feminism and civil rights are destroying the EU. For this reason I do not believe it is actually normal compliance with any regulation, it is malicious compliance meant to undermine the regulation.
I am sure some person who is glad for the malicious compliance would like to make a statement to the effect that it is the EU's fault that Meta has done it this way, so allow me to forestall it with some other observations.
If Meta feels the law requires them to remove ads for any art that supports a cause, including causes that are considered mainstream and accepted in the EU, then almost no art can ever advertised.
Guernica may not be shown, as it was anti-fascist, AND I should note Picasso's works are still under copyright so we know that's got to be regulated STAT!
The works of anyone who has ever been against slavery must not be mentioned, no Twain, Melville, Stowe, etc. etc.
But let's not stop there, surely Shakespeare's Richard III did not support that fellow's claims to the throne of England and we should not discuss it, don't tell me anything about it being a long time ago - if for Meta Virginia Wolf springs eternal then surely Shakespeare should get the same benefit of censorship. Dante's taking sides in the civil wars that damaged the Italy of his time should allow us to throw him off the platform as well!
There is very little art and few artists in this world that have been so anodyne that Meta could not censor them for having supported a social issue. I certainly hope they will do so, and quickly, so that people may be persuaded to abandon the platform. I also hope that this post is clear enough that I don't have to hear any more about how Meta had to do it the way they did, as I have recently been talking with my ex-wife, so my allowance for hearing dumb stuff is all used for today.
Same here - idk why are people jumping on the wagon of attributing the restriction to EU regulation. Looks to be a US compliance banning social topics that Trump administration is pursuing (but again, idk if that's the case, this is guesswork on my part)
> Well you can also just stop using these products
True. But there is a social cost, for now
In my neighborhood Facebook became the defacto "town square" where community organising happens. A bad idea in hindsight, but there it is
I nolonger use Facebook. Not my choice, my account disappeared and I decided not to reconstitute it, and now I pay the price
But the price gets less as time goes by as Meta killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. Their greed and carelessness is making the service less valuable or useful
This (ban Virgina Wolf FFS) is another example. If you cannot advertise what you are doing as part of your community, then what is the point?
Why be part of a service that no longer links people without fear or favour (Facebook of fifteen years ago) but solely exists to market at you?
> Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.
I don't have any of those but I do need one messenger to communicate with my buddies in the EU. As I'm a "fuck the Zuck" person and an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft), Telegram is my poison.
I don't have any doubt: I know it's not E2EE (and I doubt that one-on-one encrypted communication --it's a setting you MUST turn on-- in Telegram is actually really E2EE).
But Telegram is neither from the Zuck nor from Microsoft, so that's a big win for me.
Also basically everyone in the EU has Telegram now.
"We" is a massive group of people who all have wildly different ideas. Saying "laws could be what we want them to be" is highly subjective depending on who the "we" is at that current time.
At this point, I suspect that comments like this one are part of an astroturfing campaign by the ruling class.
It’s the same bullshit as “we could stop climate change if only we bothered to bring cloth bags to the store instead of picking up a disposable plastic bag each time”.
“We” don’t have any power. And once you accept that, you can stop blaming yourself and your neighbors for the world you live in, and direct your anger where it belongs.
Parent is not saying to be apathetic, but to stop trying to change the system while safely abiding by the system's rules. As I read it, it says: once we understand that the system is rigged, we'll turn our attention to those who rigged it (the ruling class), instead of making small useless acts these comments usually call us to do, like using cloth bags or voting for liberals (as opposed to the left).
And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
"Please ignore the person above, they are a child abuser and you can look up evidence of it online (posts list of crusty questionable sites that seemingly popped up out of nowhere). Chneu, when did you stop abusing your wife? When did you stop posting racist remarks on reddit on anonymous accounts? Why are you a member of the communist party. Why do you support trans rights? Why do you support the gays. Why do you hate the gays. Why do you hate minorities. Why do you support illegal immigration"
The above is just a tiny sample of what will happen to you when you start challenging people with power. You see, powerful "bad" people don't care how many accusations you make against them. They will flood the field with noise so people just ignore it. Now you, because you're a good guy have to be the most perfect little angel or all your followers will run away in disgust.
You know nothing about power and how to wield it. There better not be any skeletons in your closet because I will surface them. Hell, it doesn't even matter, I will plant them there.
Of course all the above is fictional, I'm not going to do these things to you because I'm not a person with millions of dollars threatened by your actions. But don't think threatening people with billions of dollars comes without cost.
Are you doubting the power of cloth bags and reusable drinking straws? Ethical consumption matters! I only buy products with green colors and “natural” looking fonts, that way I know that I’m not contributing to climate change. (Oh and although I drive a Tesla, I bought it before Elon went crazy, tee-hee.)
If only everyone would round up to the nearest dollar at checkout, we could end poverty!
“We” do, we could, if organized. Per your first point, that is the problem today - agreeing on a shared goal rather than infighting about all the peripheral issues.
I would hazard a guess theres stuff that I don't agree with you on, and we would want certain laws written differently. Its important to remember that we all vote for what we think is right, based on a system evolved over thousands of years to cater for human fallibility. The modern rhetoric of "us against the billionaires" is simply not how the world works, despite how much people want it to.
The modern rhetoric is indeed reductive if you put words in the poster's mouth.
The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works.
Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.
<Ned Flanders' father>: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
People who say this have never tried, do nothing themselves to contribute to improving the problem or to convince others or the government to improve the problem besides perhaps complaining on the internet in a bubble of likeminded people who don't need their minds changed.
I'm pretty much fine, thank you. And I am pretty sure that is true for most HN users. Most of us are not hungry. The rest is a bunch of first-world problems.
it's the opposite? the person you're replying to is exactly correct... the giant delusion that sustains this whole shitty thing is the public's disenchantment with politics; everything feels bad but no one seems to believe in "passing different laws" as the method of changing it so instead they just vent their frustrations in hopes that someone who already has power will by the goodness of their heart decide to do a better job. when in fact the lever fox fixing things, democracy, still (for the most part) exists, but almost nobody is coordinating to pull it.
causally I think this is because we all grew up watching government operate glacially and so nobody really believes there's an alternative... but I eagerly await the day that millennials realize they can just win every election and fix everything that sucks about their world by basically trying really hard and coordinating with each other.
Your optimism and faith in the power of the people is laudable, but I think you misread the comment (see my other replies in this thread).
The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.
And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.
I don't think you understand my position. I don't think I've seen anything like coordinated democratic action attempted in my lifetime (not in the US at least). Everyone doesn't believe it's possible so they don't even try it. People defer the job of organization to their (demonstrably impotent) political party and then act surprised that nothing happens. (Of course I am thinking about Democrats here; actually Trump's rise to prominence is a lot more like what actually rallying people is supposed to look like. Of course it is disappointing for others reasons...)
"Everybody" wants something to stop and yet nobody goes out and takes power and stops it so nothing changes. People experience voting doing nothing and then they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing so it does nothing tomorrow as well.
The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency. It is not hard for a group of coordinated people to win for example a local election. Well, it is hard in the sense that they have to agree to do it and actually put effort in. But it's not hard to get the requisite numbers---very few people are voting anyway. But if they don't believe in trying and instead post memes about how mad they are, of course nothing changes.
If I misunderstood your position, then you indeed misunderstood parent's, as you two (and I) are then arguing for the same thing: the system cannot be changed by following the system's rules, as people are blinded and limited by these rules.
> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency
Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.
> very few people are voting anyway
There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.
> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing
Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.
1. yes, it will require a widespread shift in people's beliefs for anything to change significantly. So such a shift is necessary.
2. I also personally believe that such a widespread shift is sufficient to fix a lot of this stuff. Nobody has any recent data for this because it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there is plenty of further-back historical evidence for it.
3. A prerequisite for the shift to occur is for everybody to believe both (1) and (2), such that they are motivated to try.
4. Anecdotally it seems like most people really believe (1) but severely doubt (2), which unfortunately means they have no motivation, so nothing has any hope of occurring right now.
5. Therefore I would encourage everyone to at least try out believing (2) as well. After all without it we have no data on what is actually possible with it.
And yes, the actual result probably looks like some form of revolution, but it is not required that such a revolution be violent. Of course it might turn out to be, but that is more about how the entrenched power reacts. You need the movement first, and then you can see what the reaction is.
re chat control or similar things---it seems to me that if your system's democratic rules pass it, then things are working as intended. Complaining about the democratic system is rather a joke when it is operating and doing things legitimately (I don't live in Europe, though, so I don't know anything about how legitimate it actually is.) In general one "votes" in this paradigm by actually convincing large groups of people that they should take difference stances on issues, not by casting a single vote themselves. If a person's reaction to political outcomes they don't like is not "campaigns of influence" then they're not really playing the game at all, are they?
And to be clear, such a campaign of influence is not only available to powerful people. In fact they are cheaper to carry out than ever---we even have a new job title for them, "influencer", and it is revenue-positive for many people! So when someone complains about legitimate political systems but they don't personally decide to influence others to change the outcomes... they are just a non-entity in the system, that's their problem.
(I do not have anything charitable to say, however, about illegitimate politics, e.g. the Trumps administration's widespread illegal behavior. That seems like a failure of basic rule of law that might be considerably harder to dislodge. But, as much as I hate it, their winning an election and then fucking everything up on purpose is largely allowed... the underlying problem is that so many people seem to be okay with that. If a country wants to cut its own limbs off itself I guess that's fine at a level of politics. Not so good at a level of morality or philosophy---so I guess it shifts the battle to be at the level of hearts and minds instead of democracy. But the general point still stands: campaigns of influence are how you affect this, not individual votes.)
(edit: i did not, however, reread the other comments here to see if I actually misunderstood anyone. I'm just ranting)
Appears to be a response to EU regulation in 2025 banning political/electoral advertising [1]:
> Ending Political, Electoral and Social Issue Advertising in the EU in Response to Incoming European Regulation
I guess rather than micro-regulate what constitutes "designed to influence an election/referendum, voting behavior, or a legislative/regulatory process", they just decided to refuse to run ads for anything potentially politically or socially "sensitive".
I'm guessing that they also refuse to run ads for things that are less socially acceptable such as anti-feminism which I would say is a good thing.
The regulation asks to label political ads and restricts how targeted they can be. Meta is doing the usual whining because that touches their bottom line a tiny bit, there is nothing serious in their complaint. Political ads aren’t banned in the EU
Look at Meta argument in the article you linked to:
> For example, the TTPA places extensive restrictions on ad targeting and delivery which would restrict how political and social issue advertisers can reach their audiences and lead to people seeing less relevant ads on our platforms. It is yet another threat to the principles of personalized advertising, ignoring the benefits to advertisers and the people they want to reach.
They don’t complain advertising is banned, they complain they cannot achieve their dream of perfect “personalized advertising”. It’s such a lame complain
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
It's a problem with EU over-broad regulation enacted last year that is nearly impossible to comply with, which is why most social media has just banned political or "cause"-centric advertising completely. Unfortunately "feminism" falls into that category.
As a Spaniard, neither is expected. The most censor-like behavior you get is a random mayor from a small town that decides to not support a particular artist of the opposite ideology for public funded shows and it goes viral.
I wanted to parenthetically say that I recently saw Job, set in the Bay Area. The show was provocative and contemporary. I don't remember if I saw an ad for it...
"Jane, an employee at a big tech company, has been placed on leave after video of her emotional breakdown at work went viral. Her employers tell Jane she must be evaluated by crisis therapist Loyd before she can be reinstated to the job that gives her life meaning."
Meta does not do this outside the EU. It's a EU problem, and was caused by the EU's TTPA enacted last year which imposes heavy bureaucratic compliance process on any advertising that touches on any social or political topics.
Meta doesn't do this outside the EU, and they didn't do this in the EU prior to the TTPA. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a "meta problem."
This is a shitty article. It doesn’t mention that the ban on social ads in the EU is due to their anti-free speech rules rather than a Meta specific policy. Meta is in favor of social activism ads in general but restricts them in the EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
In my community (outside USA), we use local websites and posted bills. There's no magic to it.
>Network effects
If people decide the cost/effort is too high, that will dissipate.
>"Somebody else will"
This amounts to a thought-terminating cliche at this point. You are responsible for your own choices, not what others do. It's the worst cop out, you are claiming no agency.
*royal "you" where applicable.
I find a lot of responses to these stories fiendish. It is not "privileged" to refuse a bad deal. If anything, it is "privileged" to say one has no choice.
Sorry if this comes off as rantish... I find a lot of the conversation around big conglomerates tedious and usually just laden with overtly bad-faith arguments and lazy defeatism. Conversely, love or hate Woolf, surely there is enough respect for simple arts people should find these behaviors abhorrent.
Agreed. The other comments talking about the "heavy burden" of complying with local laws are missing the point - these ads would still be profitable for Meta even accounting for the costs of compliance (which, after all, are primarily one-off cost of implementing an automated system, and which can be amortised over many users).
The fact that Meta is choosing instead to refuse the ads is therefore purely performative and likely intended to elicit precisely those sort of anti-regulation comments in their aid.
> As a theatre we have to publicise our activities … and we have to make use of social media so that people are aware of cultural activities
Does the theater have a right to advertise? Is FB obligated to carry their ads?
Can FB unilaterally reject their ads, even without giving a reason?
It seems only fair they control what happens inside their walled garden. But they are effectively holding their user population as hostages. Don't like the decision? You can fuck off.
> To resolve the situation, Meta recommended removing “key words” so that the text doesn’t appear to encourage activism.
Move along now, don’t make a racket, don’t do anything to disturb count Zuckerberg and his masters. Go away with your progressive ideas like… Allowing women to express themselves.
Why meta is not fully banned in the EU is beyond me :)
I know banning or forcing meta to obey laws in the US is impossible due to bribes (political contributions), but in the EU I would think meta could at the very least be reined in.
This actually is a result of Meta being forced to obey EU law. Not sure why the article didn't explain things at all, but Regulation (EU) 2024/900 greatly restricts political advertising with typical vagueness, so Meta is enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.
Information like this should be front-and-center. Call it malicious compliance if one wishes, but if there is one thing that is clear, Meta does not do anything (besides try and make money) without being forced to. A blanket ban on anything political does indeed mean a ban on all sides of an issue, even ones many would agree is positive.
The comment you’re responding to and that you want front and center is plainly wrong. The regulation is about transparency and restricting targeted advertising technics for political advertising. That has nothing to do with the situation at hand, it is meta doing something on their own.
And your point about Meta being forced to act is also wrong, companies aren’t just passive institutions that only react to regulations, they constantly take decisions and actions, and regularly manufacture that type of situation as a way to lobby regulators
It doesn't ban political advertising, it requires labeling/transparency, and prohibits targeting without consent or based on categories like race or religion.
It also defines political ad narrowly as placed by a political actor or campaign, or intended to influence some part of the political process, like voting, legislation, or regulatory action.
If that were the case, we wouldn't have far right AI generated political ads everywhere in Facebook. Just one example from France this week[1]
I don't know what motivation Facebook has to automatically limit certain political advertising and not other, but it certainly has nothing to do with EU regulation
an AD for a theater play is by no standard political advertisement
Political advertisement in the regulations context is reasonable clearly defined.
An AD for a theater play is in general very clearly _not_ covered by it.
To add to it: Civil rights & feminism (in it's official non hijacked definition, aka. equal fair treatment of man and women) are fundamental rights in the EU, something the regulation very clearly states it doesn't want to impeach on. So arguments that you could accidentally misread the regulation to include banning _non-political advertisement about artistic work covering fundamental rights are a bit absurd_.
Anywhere here is the definition of political advertisement in given regulation:
> political advertising’ means the preparation, placement, promotion, publication, delivery or dissemination, by any means, of a message, normally provided for remuneration or through in-house activities or as part of a _political advertising campaign_:
> (a)by, for or on behalf of a _political actor_, unless it is of a purely private or a purely commercial nature; or
> (b) which is liable and designed to _influence the outcome of an election or referendum_, voting behaviour or a legislative or regulatory process, at Union, national, regional or local level;
(emphasis mine)
So to put it simple: Meta is engaging in censure.
Stretching the term political to include more or less everything (like any topic people have opinions about a politician might speak about) is IMHO a pretty dishonest misinterpretation, especially given that it isn't even everything, but "everything Meta doesn't want to get involved with due to the current political environment".
At best this misinterpretation is due to laziness, at worst pushed by malicious actors in the US.
Given that Meta is a US company and the currently people in power there find this topics quit unpleasant and Metas long history of not faithfully complying with law and allowing all kind of ADs this looks very bad for them.
"Designed to influence…voting behaviour" is incredibly vague. A play with political undertones could absolutely fit that definition. I understand that's not what was intended by the law, but if someone was advertising plays with support for policies you didn't like, you likely would be calling that political.
More relevantly, a broad, vague policy means an EU regulator can prosecute Meta whenever they feel like it if Meta does not go overboard.
the law came into effect due to widespread advertising campaigns on facebook by someone (often thought to be russian government based) for both sides of any culture war topics, presumably to drive division. Things like simultaneously advertising BLM/ACAB + thin blue line.
> so Meta is enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.
No. Meta enforces a broad ban because they don't want EU to regulate them, so they drag their feet and create the most possible "unwanted collateral damage" so people will get upset at the regulation instead of the company. So, pieces like this from The Guardian are surely needed.
If cookie consent dialogs have been going on for as long as they have, can they really be called malicious compliance at this point? Seems like people believe that is the actual intent of the regulation at this point.
I personally see fewer and fewer of those original dialogs that had you deny 20-30 items one by one. Most of the pages I land on have the deny all button or have given up on pretending they care.
Meta aren't 'forced' to do anything other than treat the fines imposed by their lack of adherence to the laws of the territories they operate in as a BAU cost. Meta's profits run roughly the same as the GDP of Paraguay ($60.46 billion in 2025) - i.e. that Country's total value added by an economy through wages, profits, and taxes. Their revenue is on track to exceed the Ukrainian GDP next year.
This year Meta will pay up to $16.7bn to settle landmark US legal actions as result of not obeying US law, reporting $2.4 billion in legal fees in Q2 alone.
The sum total of the EU fines issued (read: appealed and not collected) likely won't even exceed Metas legal fees for the 2026 calendar year; i.e.:
* April 2025 - €200m (DMA "consent or pay" advertising model)
* November 2024 - €797.72m (Antitrust re:Facebook Marketplace)
* September 2024 - €90m (Storage of user passwords in plaintext)
* May 2023 - €1.2b (Unlawful EU-U.S. user data transfers)
* January 2023 - €390m (Forcing personalized ads via terms of service)
* December 2022 - €251m (2018 data breach and system design lapses)
* November 2022 - €265 (Inadequate protection against data scraping)
* September 2022 - €405m (Instagram children's privacy)
No, showing ads for feminism or social issues related plays is not illegal in Europe. Nor fined. And it is practically practiced all around the Europe.
This strategy of "we will lie about what the law enforces, so that we can blame the regulator instead of the company" is getting old.
> Why meta is not fully banned in the EU is beyond me :)
It’s pretty simple - the EU is unable to produce alternatives. This is because they don’t have the software talent for it.
Any talent they do have immediately runs for the SF Bay Area of the United States at the first opportunity.
You want good alternatives to Meta’s products? Pay engineers a competitive salary.
And no, the lower cost of living doesn’t even remotely begin to make up for the difference in comp. Same with healthcare - it’s effectively free in the United States for people who have jobs, especially so for SWEs.
You're on the right track but instead of losing themselves to fascism what you should more accurately be pointing out, in my opinion, is that in general societies are becoming a lot more open to authoritarian ideologies, whether that's communism, fascism, or similar.
Why do you think so many big tech companies are registering subsidiaries in Ireland? (Aside form the "Double Irish" mechanism that used to be in vogue more than a decade ago).
Plenty of hands seem to be well greased over there given how long it takes to issue fines for clear&cut violations of EU regulation.
Yes, Meta has consistently acted with integrity and has earned the benefit of the doubt in situations like these. It's safer to assume that the massive PR team working for this one-woman play in Spain has manufactured the whole thing, including the damning quotes, which the Guardian has somehow published without properly verifying.
The guy you’re responding to is acknowledging FB’s crap practices and is suggesting a PR team may be using that to their advantage for guerrilla marketing. Not an insane suggestion, actually savvy and common in our modern rage landscape.
The article doesn't mention this, of course, but Meta prohibits "socially sensitive" advertising due to the EU's TTPA law, or "Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising."
It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.
Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.
This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.
That’s not true, you’re repeating the exact same wrong statement that has been said multiple times in the comments. The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be. There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything. It’s very clearly a Meta problem, they are the ones deciding to make a blanket ban on ads for social issues (or at least say they are doing it, in practice that doesn’t seem to be the case, we don’t have a lack of such advertising in the EU)
> There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything.
They didn't claim that. Many EU regulations don't actually ban the thing, but make it more expensive, cumbersome, risky, etc... This has a similar effect as censorship, but doesn't imply there is some law that say "it is illegal to say X".
I did not say the EU forces Meta to ban it; perhaps you should re-read the comment.
It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.
You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).
The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.
I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.
The concern is not that you make a mistake. The concern is that you absolutely cannot trust a significant portion of the advertisers who would be your market for these ads, and who would cheerfully hammer you with attempts to get around compliance until they succeed.
These are also the folks this law is actually aimed at. So mission accomplished...
They didn’t claim the EU regulations forced Meta to ban anything. They claimed Meta decided “the juice is not worth the squeeze” when it comes to compliance. I don’t know who’s right to be fair, but I haven’t heard about any other instances of this with Meta, have you? What is it about this particular case? Never heard of this happening in the US. Possibly just an isolated incident blown out of proportion?
The words of the TTPA:
> liable and designed to influence the outcome of an election or referendum, voting behaviour or a legislative or regulatory process, at Union, national, regional or local level
Now, we all agree feminism is an important civil rights topic and Virginia Woolf should be (and is) celebrated in the western world. But how can a platform that is explicitly not allowed to permit advertising for political or social causes be allowed to run paid ads about "feminism" especially while Equal Pay for Equal Work is such a hot-button political issue [1] all over Europe?
So on the one hand we have the EU saying that no political or cause-centric advertising is permitted, and on the other hand the regulation is so overly broad that it is left up to everyone else to "figure it out".
As a result, and as we see here, most social media has just chosen to ban it all completely.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...
This seems like a distinction without a difference. The EU gets to choose their rules and Meta gets to make business decisions about how to comply with those rules. One can complain about either, I suppose.
I don’t know how the cost-benefit analysis happened within Meta when considering approaches but presumably they would rather be getting paid to show more ads rather than not being paid. Their policies may also change over time as they invest more in their systems or if the rules change.
Ultimately it seems to me like the real problem was that the advertiser in this case was quite tiny and the representative they spoke to perhaps didn’t do a great job of explaining the issue (and the customer was too insignificant to justify a more high-touch approach). Presumably if you’re paying a lot more for advertising you can get better treatment and perhaps Meta would also appropriately label political ads if you were wanting to spend a lot on them.
Can you quote your sources? The article doesn't mention anything about the regulation you're stating as a fact.
> The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be.
This doesn't sound like a good thing. Why shouldn't a political group be able to target people who are going to care the most about an issue/politician with an ad? Basically Meta has too good of a profile, so they aren't able to target ads. I would want to know personally, if Politician X is for/against a policy I feel strongly about.
This is to prevent bubbles, extreme polarization, and psychological manipulation. The goal is to prevent another Cambridge Analytica.
Also if you think about it, it would be bad if different people saw completely different political ads. Party could "promise" one thing to some people, and completely contradictory thing to other people. Since people would live in their tight bubbles, most of them wouldn't notice. And this ("dark ads") is something that is definitely technically possible right now.
I doubt it's the bureaucratic cost (the Transparency part), because Meta can devolve most of it onto advertisers, and with their solution they still have the bureaucratic cost of preventing political ads from being served at all.
But there's also the Targeting part, which prohibits using people's personal data for targeting political ads unless they explicitly opted in. Meta describes this as "people seeing less relevant ads on our platforms." https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral... Of course people seeing ads intended for other demographic groups is precisely the point, to force political actors to present a coherent image of themselves to the public.
The same requirements apply to traditional billboard and newspaper ads, but since those can't do microtargeting by design, they don't lose value as a result in the way Meta ads do.
>Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all
Obviously, Meta's most important revenue stream comes from scam advertisements, so all other ads are expendable.
As far as I know, political ads just must be labelled as such and there are some other small restrictions. Definitely not something that is hard for meta to implement, if they wanted to. But I admit that fines are very severe (up to 6% of annual turnover, in theory), so I see why they don't want to risk it.
Metas lobbyists wrote the EU law precisely so you could deflect blame away from meta and to the government here.
We don't have to put up with this. We simply choose to. But our laws could be whatever we want them to be.
Unfortunately, "we" is often those with the monetary means to make their voice heard.
Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.
Folks want Facebook or whatever to be regulated into some perfect idea they have in their heads of how it should work and how it should be regulated. Sorry, many people have many views on that, and you're never going to be happy with an outcome. Even this article - Facebook is complying with EU rules/regulations and now you're not happy that your voice isn't heard through your preferred form of political activism. If Facebook allows this content, they break EU laws, or they have to allow some content you disagree with and now you're mad.
I don't know why people, right, left, or sideways keep putting up with this stuff.
>I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit
There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement. While I am a person who doesn't use those services (and recently stopped using reddit), a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.
Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them.
Individual boycotts rarely work, even ones that attract attention from a good number of people, companies are better at waiting than individuals seem to be. Political action has a much higher likelihood of success when driven by smaller motivated groups.
> There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement.
Good, I am pro-privilege and support being privileged. I'm not sure how and why we came to the point in our society where if someone says "hey these products suck and I'm not going to use them", someone has to come along and attempt to guilt them into using them? You want me to create a Facebook account and post pictures of funny cats because Joe and Sally podcaster need eyeballs for their rage-bait podcasts or quirky coffee mug they drop-shipped from China?
Sorry, not buying it. Don't like the products? Stop using them. Reliant on them? Go complain to regulators. Not my monkeys, not my circus.
For many, it is less silly cat pictures and more listing products for sale from a legitimate registered business (catering is a common one for example). Gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. If you do not take advantage of tools afforded to you, someone will and because social media like facebook is "free," that is a go-to.
The "someone will" arguments never work for me.
I live in a community (outside USA) where it is common to advertise offline or alternative outlets.
There's no dependence "because others do". That is just defeatism. If people choose en masse to change their habits, the world has to follow suit, imho.
>If people choose en masse to change
This is nearly saying "If people stop murdering each other we won't have murder any more". Well, yea no shit, a tautology is a tautology. The question is how do you elicit social change in an environment that is actively fighting back against you doing so and has a massive amount more information than you do.
One of the key points here is you live outside the US so it's much more likely that your communities are far less digitally integrated and have a much different history of social change and dynamics. For example car culture presents an absolutely massive amount of friction to social change. It literally physically separates us at much larger distances than states that do not have car culture. There is also the fact the modern social media swept over the US first drawing in most of the population long before we recognized the dangers of it. Government agencies and businesses moved a healthy amount of their communications to things like social media platforms. The network effects are powerful.
The next thing I'd like you to do is get on social media where all these people you want to change are and tell them to get off.... oooh, your account was banned. These companies are organisms that will fight back against what your trying. You forget the tobacco companies fought in the US for 30+ years inventing entirely new methods of propaganda before we developed laws to protect the rest of us against smoke in public.
You are not talking about a choice. You are talking about a war that is actively being fought.
Sure, folks can do what they want. I'm not disputing that, but this idea of "privilege" in this context, to me, is quite ridiculous.
> a large number of people are required to use those services for their job
Okay, but their job is a net drag on our society, so you haven’t quite convinced me.
Counterproposal: ban influencers
Counter-counterproposal, ban influencers without attempting to ban advertising triggering an immune response from a multi-hundred billion dollar a year industry.
> a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.
You mean 'influencers'?
Nothing of value has been lost.
> Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them
Please can you provide an example. I can't say I've ever experienced such a thing (and would never GDPR opt-in to such data sharing even if the opportunity was there).
While, yes, influences of course use social media, most companies have realized having a social media presence is important today. I would be interested to see stats on how beneficial social media has been to, say, Wendy's.
Yea, I think among a fair portion of HN there is a misunderstanding of how economically connected social media is to businesses and people. For example Meta is one of the largest advertising agencies on earth.
My wife for example has a $200k+ job that involves a whole lot of interaction with social media. For her that would mean ending her job and moving on to god knows what, but probably not anything that pays near as well.
And then you come to the people that represent her customers. They make 70%+ of their income advertising services either on line or social media platforms.
So you end up in a race conditions. These people can't quit social media in one way or another or they stop eating. The customers have to move somewhere else first to redistribute the power the companies hold over those needing to advertise. Mostly what we see is not people quitting social media, but just moving to another social media platform shifting the problem. But also, because these people are advertising and doing tangentially related things on social media it brings their users to social media to get information.
Sounds like the coal miners in West Virginia whose livelihoods depend on coal production.
I mean it's also the same thing we're starting to see with programmers and AI too, which is highly ironic after tall the "lrn 2 code" stuff that was posted online around that time.
If a programmer says I'm not going to use AI and the company says use AI, the programmer can absolutely walk, but god, I would not want to try to find a new job right now.
This is why things like unions and consumers pushing for consumer protection laws are fought by companies so hard. They are far more effective than individual actions because the incentives are against individual success.
If your business requires the use of one of these platforms in order to exist I would question its viability. Willingly giving a single company that much power over you is a horrible position to be in. Maybe it does put food on the table this month, great! But what happens if Zuck (or a piece of dumb automation) decides next month to boot you?
That has absolutely nothing to do with the EU regulation that requires to label political ads and restricts targeting technics
Yes it does. You're using the product and seeing the ad. You and others are mad that the product is complying with the regulation in a way you don't prefer. Stop using the product, and no ad is there to be seen and none of this matters.
I don’t use meta’s products. The issue has absolutely nothing to do about an ad ban. There is no ban of political advertising in the EU.
Ban/regulation, whatever. It's in the article and comments. Whatever you want to call that.
> When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.
That’s Meta response. There is no mention of any regulation in that article.
Just because The Guardian intentionally didn't mention the regulations or role they might play and you want to be pedantic about their existence doesn't mean there aren't any.
Businesses are allowed to and routinely comply with regulations to their best ability even if it wasn't as intended based on the act of the regulator/government.
For ex:
[1] https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...
[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...
You’re the one who mentioned it was in the article.
Have you read that regulation? Because I did, and it’s not any form of ban on political advertising
It wasn't in the article. Ok we can move past that now.
You can ban something by requiring excessive compliance with a regulation that is unobtainable or very unprofitable. The Guardian failed to even mention the regulation or what may have motivated Meta's actions.
That's a problem. That the Guardian doesn't mention the regulation and doesn't give us the wording of the advertisement.
Meta go one further and literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event in their own published guidelines on Slide - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - as eligible to run in the EU.
https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...
This was either an automated filter set to 'anti-woke' or some childish attempt at malicious compliance, or both. Thousands of such plays are advertised on numerous platforms across Europe every year without incident or comment.
Yes, it’s so transparent I cannot fathom how so many people directly assume it’s the EU fault. Meta isn’t subtle at all in their lobbying
That's Meta's response to advertising rules that they find too onerous. Governments keep trying to regulate businesses to appease the voters, sometimes they go too far and the business decides the sensible thing is to leave the market.
This is especially an issue with insurance in disaster prone areas. Insurance company comes along and notices that in the east it's houses very close to the beach (hurricanes/storm surge), in California it's wildfires. Insurance companies raise the premiums in such areas to reflect the risk, the people living there scream. The state does things that mandate spreading the risk--now the dangerous behavior continues but others pay the cost. And those others start screaming because they are paying insurance rates way above the value delivered. And sometimes we insurance companies simply pull up stakes and leave--and we see states responding by saying if you want to do any business in the state you'll provide the homeowner's insurance at a "fair" (not fair, it's a price they're losing money on) rate. I'm not aware of any insurance companies completely leaving a state yet.
We have seen this with malpractice insurance for doctors, though. The biggest carrier simply quit and the market went crazy. Locally we had doctors who would pay more for malpractice insurance for delivering a baby than the insurance payment for delivering said baby.
So how exactly is an ad for a play by an author who died 85 years ago political and requiring regulation? A person who died so long ago that, even in the EU with its onerous copyright regime, her work is in the public domain!?
It is a general thing that people only want to ban or regulate things that are against the social standards of their political organization, feminism and civil rights are two things that are pretty central to the EU. I know they must be, because I always read American right-wing commentators say about how feminism and civil rights are destroying the EU. For this reason I do not believe it is actually normal compliance with any regulation, it is malicious compliance meant to undermine the regulation.
I am sure some person who is glad for the malicious compliance would like to make a statement to the effect that it is the EU's fault that Meta has done it this way, so allow me to forestall it with some other observations.
If Meta feels the law requires them to remove ads for any art that supports a cause, including causes that are considered mainstream and accepted in the EU, then almost no art can ever advertised.
Guernica may not be shown, as it was anti-fascist, AND I should note Picasso's works are still under copyright so we know that's got to be regulated STAT!
The works of anyone who has ever been against slavery must not be mentioned, no Twain, Melville, Stowe, etc. etc.
But let's not stop there, surely Shakespeare's Richard III did not support that fellow's claims to the throne of England and we should not discuss it, don't tell me anything about it being a long time ago - if for Meta Virginia Wolf springs eternal then surely Shakespeare should get the same benefit of censorship. Dante's taking sides in the civil wars that damaged the Italy of his time should allow us to throw him off the platform as well!
There is very little art and few artists in this world that have been so anodyne that Meta could not censor them for having supported a social issue. I certainly hope they will do so, and quickly, so that people may be persuaded to abandon the platform. I also hope that this post is clear enough that I don't have to hear any more about how Meta had to do it the way they did, as I have recently been talking with my ex-wife, so my allowance for hearing dumb stuff is all used for today.
Same here - idk why are people jumping on the wagon of attributing the restriction to EU regulation. Looks to be a US compliance banning social topics that Trump administration is pursuing (but again, idk if that's the case, this is guesswork on my part)
> Well you can also just stop using these products
True. But there is a social cost, for now
In my neighborhood Facebook became the defacto "town square" where community organising happens. A bad idea in hindsight, but there it is
I nolonger use Facebook. Not my choice, my account disappeared and I decided not to reconstitute it, and now I pay the price
But the price gets less as time goes by as Meta killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. Their greed and carelessness is making the service less valuable or useful
This (ban Virgina Wolf FFS) is another example. If you cannot advertise what you are doing as part of your community, then what is the point?
Why be part of a service that no longer links people without fear or favour (Facebook of fifteen years ago) but solely exists to market at you?
> Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.
I don't have any of those but I do need one messenger to communicate with my buddies in the EU. As I'm a "fuck the Zuck" person and an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft), Telegram is my poison.
I don't have any doubt: I know it's not E2EE (and I doubt that one-on-one encrypted communication --it's a setting you MUST turn on-- in Telegram is actually really E2EE).
But Telegram is neither from the Zuck nor from Microsoft, so that's a big win for me.
Also basically everyone in the EU has Telegram now.
"We" is a massive group of people who all have wildly different ideas. Saying "laws could be what we want them to be" is highly subjective depending on who the "we" is at that current time.
Yea, people use We as the royal we quite often. What "people" miss about the royal we is it works much better when you have lots and lots of money.
At this point, I suspect that comments like this one are part of an astroturfing campaign by the ruling class.
It’s the same bullshit as “we could stop climate change if only we bothered to bring cloth bags to the store instead of picking up a disposable plastic bag each time”.
“We” don’t have any power. And once you accept that, you can stop blaming yourself and your neighbors for the world you live in, and direct your anger where it belongs.
The power is with the people. It only takes about 1/4th of a community enact massive change.
Your take is exactly what keeps people apathetic and reliant on others.
"It's someone else's fault and someone else's responsibility" is what you're saying.
It relieves the individual of the outcome of their actions. 8 billion people matter.
If I were an abuser, I would LOVE to hear my victims say they are powerless. Think about that.
Parent is not saying to be apathetic, but to stop trying to change the system while safely abiding by the system's rules. As I read it, it says: once we understand that the system is rigged, we'll turn our attention to those who rigged it (the ruling class), instead of making small useless acts these comments usually call us to do, like using cloth bags or voting for liberals (as opposed to the left).
And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
> 8 billion people matter
I doubt that even 8,000 people “matter” in the sense of having meaningful power.
"Please ignore the person above, they are a child abuser and you can look up evidence of it online (posts list of crusty questionable sites that seemingly popped up out of nowhere). Chneu, when did you stop abusing your wife? When did you stop posting racist remarks on reddit on anonymous accounts? Why are you a member of the communist party. Why do you support trans rights? Why do you support the gays. Why do you hate the gays. Why do you hate minorities. Why do you support illegal immigration"
The above is just a tiny sample of what will happen to you when you start challenging people with power. You see, powerful "bad" people don't care how many accusations you make against them. They will flood the field with noise so people just ignore it. Now you, because you're a good guy have to be the most perfect little angel or all your followers will run away in disgust.
You know nothing about power and how to wield it. There better not be any skeletons in your closet because I will surface them. Hell, it doesn't even matter, I will plant them there.
Of course all the above is fictional, I'm not going to do these things to you because I'm not a person with millions of dollars threatened by your actions. But don't think threatening people with billions of dollars comes without cost.
> direct your anger where it belongs.
Where does it belong?
> Where does it belong?
Their argument is so generic they would probably say something equally as generic and useless like 'The billionaires"
Are you doubting the power of cloth bags and reusable drinking straws? Ethical consumption matters! I only buy products with green colors and “natural” looking fonts, that way I know that I’m not contributing to climate change. (Oh and although I drive a Tesla, I bought it before Elon went crazy, tee-hee.)
If only everyone would round up to the nearest dollar at checkout, we could end poverty!
“We” do, we could, if organized. Per your first point, that is the problem today - agreeing on a shared goal rather than infighting about all the peripheral issues.
Whos "We"?
I would hazard a guess theres stuff that I don't agree with you on, and we would want certain laws written differently. Its important to remember that we all vote for what we think is right, based on a system evolved over thousands of years to cater for human fallibility. The modern rhetoric of "us against the billionaires" is simply not how the world works, despite how much people want it to.
The modern rhetoric is indeed reductive if you put words in the poster's mouth.
The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works.
Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.
What looks like a peripheral issue to you is somebody else's central goal. And vice versa.
>“We” don’t have any power.
<Ned Flanders' father>: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
People who say this have never tried, do nothing themselves to contribute to improving the problem or to convince others or the government to improve the problem besides perhaps complaining on the internet in a bubble of likeminded people who don't need their minds changed.
What is the problem?
There are many of them, whatever it is you feel needs improvement.
I'm pretty much fine, thank you. And I am pretty sure that is true for most HN users. Most of us are not hungry. The rest is a bunch of first-world problems.
it's the opposite? the person you're replying to is exactly correct... the giant delusion that sustains this whole shitty thing is the public's disenchantment with politics; everything feels bad but no one seems to believe in "passing different laws" as the method of changing it so instead they just vent their frustrations in hopes that someone who already has power will by the goodness of their heart decide to do a better job. when in fact the lever fox fixing things, democracy, still (for the most part) exists, but almost nobody is coordinating to pull it.
causally I think this is because we all grew up watching government operate glacially and so nobody really believes there's an alternative... but I eagerly await the day that millennials realize they can just win every election and fix everything that sucks about their world by basically trying really hard and coordinating with each other.
Your optimism and faith in the power of the people is laudable, but I think you misread the comment (see my other replies in this thread).
The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.
And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.
[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/16/vilificatio...
I don't think you understand my position. I don't think I've seen anything like coordinated democratic action attempted in my lifetime (not in the US at least). Everyone doesn't believe it's possible so they don't even try it. People defer the job of organization to their (demonstrably impotent) political party and then act surprised that nothing happens. (Of course I am thinking about Democrats here; actually Trump's rise to prominence is a lot more like what actually rallying people is supposed to look like. Of course it is disappointing for others reasons...)
"Everybody" wants something to stop and yet nobody goes out and takes power and stops it so nothing changes. People experience voting doing nothing and then they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing so it does nothing tomorrow as well.
The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency. It is not hard for a group of coordinated people to win for example a local election. Well, it is hard in the sense that they have to agree to do it and actually put effort in. But it's not hard to get the requisite numbers---very few people are voting anyway. But if they don't believe in trying and instead post memes about how mad they are, of course nothing changes.
If I misunderstood your position, then you indeed misunderstood parent's, as you two (and I) are then arguing for the same thing: the system cannot be changed by following the system's rules, as people are blinded and limited by these rules.
> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency
Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.
> very few people are voting anyway
There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.
> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing
Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.
I guess my stance is that:
1. yes, it will require a widespread shift in people's beliefs for anything to change significantly. So such a shift is necessary.
2. I also personally believe that such a widespread shift is sufficient to fix a lot of this stuff. Nobody has any recent data for this because it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there is plenty of further-back historical evidence for it.
3. A prerequisite for the shift to occur is for everybody to believe both (1) and (2), such that they are motivated to try.
4. Anecdotally it seems like most people really believe (1) but severely doubt (2), which unfortunately means they have no motivation, so nothing has any hope of occurring right now.
5. Therefore I would encourage everyone to at least try out believing (2) as well. After all without it we have no data on what is actually possible with it.
And yes, the actual result probably looks like some form of revolution, but it is not required that such a revolution be violent. Of course it might turn out to be, but that is more about how the entrenched power reacts. You need the movement first, and then you can see what the reaction is.
re chat control or similar things---it seems to me that if your system's democratic rules pass it, then things are working as intended. Complaining about the democratic system is rather a joke when it is operating and doing things legitimately (I don't live in Europe, though, so I don't know anything about how legitimate it actually is.) In general one "votes" in this paradigm by actually convincing large groups of people that they should take difference stances on issues, not by casting a single vote themselves. If a person's reaction to political outcomes they don't like is not "campaigns of influence" then they're not really playing the game at all, are they?
And to be clear, such a campaign of influence is not only available to powerful people. In fact they are cheaper to carry out than ever---we even have a new job title for them, "influencer", and it is revenue-positive for many people! So when someone complains about legitimate political systems but they don't personally decide to influence others to change the outcomes... they are just a non-entity in the system, that's their problem.
(I do not have anything charitable to say, however, about illegitimate politics, e.g. the Trumps administration's widespread illegal behavior. That seems like a failure of basic rule of law that might be considerably harder to dislodge. But, as much as I hate it, their winning an election and then fucking everything up on purpose is largely allowed... the underlying problem is that so many people seem to be okay with that. If a country wants to cut its own limbs off itself I guess that's fine at a level of politics. Not so good at a level of morality or philosophy---so I guess it shifts the battle to be at the level of hearts and minds instead of democracy. But the general point still stands: campaigns of influence are how you affect this, not individual votes.)
(edit: i did not, however, reread the other comments here to see if I actually misunderstood anyone. I'm just ranting)
The only “genocide” in history where the population actually increased.
This is another “if everyone just …”. Everyone will not “just”. We can’t even agree on basic facts like your claim of genocide.
Appears to be a response to EU regulation in 2025 banning political/electoral advertising [1]:
> Ending Political, Electoral and Social Issue Advertising in the EU in Response to Incoming European Regulation
I guess rather than micro-regulate what constitutes "designed to influence an election/referendum, voting behavior, or a legislative/regulatory process", they just decided to refuse to run ads for anything potentially politically or socially "sensitive".
I'm guessing that they also refuse to run ads for things that are less socially acceptable such as anti-feminism which I would say is a good thing.
[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...
How is Meta supposed to police that line? In a democracy, influencing voting behavior is a key purpose of every “cause.”
Where did you get this from? I don't see anything in the article mentioning that specific regulation
The regulation asks to label political ads and restricts how targeted they can be. Meta is doing the usual whining because that touches their bottom line a tiny bit, there is nothing serious in their complaint. Political ads aren’t banned in the EU
Look at Meta argument in the article you linked to:
> For example, the TTPA places extensive restrictions on ad targeting and delivery which would restrict how political and social issue advertisers can reach their audiences and lead to people seeing less relevant ads on our platforms. It is yet another threat to the principles of personalized advertising, ignoring the benefits to advertisers and the people they want to reach.
They don’t complain advertising is banned, they complain they cannot achieve their dream of perfect “personalized advertising”. It’s such a lame complain
Completely wrong.
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...
Is this an EU or Spain issue? I regularly attend at a theatre in Chicago that has socially "sensitive" plays. I often see their ads on Facebook.
It's a problem with EU over-broad regulation enacted last year that is nearly impossible to comply with, which is why most social media has just banned political or "cause"-centric advertising completely. Unfortunately "feminism" falls into that category.
As a Spaniard, neither is expected. The most censor-like behavior you get is a random mayor from a small town that decides to not support a particular artist of the opposite ideology for public funded shows and it goes viral.
This is meta's choice.
I wanted to parenthetically say that I recently saw Job, set in the Bay Area. The show was provocative and contemporary. I don't remember if I saw an ad for it...
"Jane, an employee at a big tech company, has been placed on leave after video of her emotional breakdown at work went viral. Her employers tell Jane she must be evaluated by crisis therapist Loyd before she can be reinstated to the job that gives her life meaning."
https://www.writerstheatre.org/events/job
It’s a meta problem
Meta does not do this outside the EU. It's a EU problem, and was caused by the EU's TTPA enacted last year which imposes heavy bureaucratic compliance process on any advertising that touches on any social or political topics.
Meta doesn't do this outside the EU, and they didn't do this in the EU prior to the TTPA. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a "meta problem."
It’s Meta lobbying against EU regulations that requires to restrict how targeted politics ads can be. Making it a Meta problem
Failure to comply with burdensome regulation in the way that you would prefer does not inherently make it the problem of those you have burdened.
It's their choice among other viable choices, so the "problem" is on their end.
If the law mandated exactly one thing, then it'd be the law's problem. Since it doesn't, of course the choice of how to comply can be criticized.
Reading other comments in this thread it appears to be more of an EU rule/law. Can you elaborate on how this is 'on' meta?
This is a shitty article. It doesn’t mention that the ban on social ads in the EU is due to their anti-free speech rules rather than a Meta specific policy. Meta is in favor of social activism ads in general but restricts them in the EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...
Completely wrong.
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...
Why do people still bother with meta and others?
In my community (outside USA), we use local websites and posted bills. There's no magic to it.
>Network effects
If people decide the cost/effort is too high, that will dissipate.
>"Somebody else will"
This amounts to a thought-terminating cliche at this point. You are responsible for your own choices, not what others do. It's the worst cop out, you are claiming no agency.
*royal "you" where applicable.
I find a lot of responses to these stories fiendish. It is not "privileged" to refuse a bad deal. If anything, it is "privileged" to say one has no choice.
Sorry if this comes off as rantish... I find a lot of the conversation around big conglomerates tedious and usually just laden with overtly bad-faith arguments and lazy defeatism. Conversely, love or hate Woolf, surely there is enough respect for simple arts people should find these behaviors abhorrent.
Sounds like malicious compliance, they should get a fine for that as well.
Maybe they should be forced to advertise "Careless People"
Agreed. The other comments talking about the "heavy burden" of complying with local laws are missing the point - these ads would still be profitable for Meta even accounting for the costs of compliance (which, after all, are primarily one-off cost of implementing an automated system, and which can be amortised over many users).
The fact that Meta is choosing instead to refuse the ads is therefore purely performative and likely intended to elicit precisely those sort of anti-regulation comments in their aid.
> As a theatre we have to publicise our activities … and we have to make use of social media so that people are aware of cultural activities
Does the theater have a right to advertise? Is FB obligated to carry their ads?
Can FB unilaterally reject their ads, even without giving a reason?
It seems only fair they control what happens inside their walled garden. But they are effectively holding their user population as hostages. Don't like the decision? You can fuck off.
> To resolve the situation, Meta recommended removing “key words” so that the text doesn’t appear to encourage activism.
Move along now, don’t make a racket, don’t do anything to disturb count Zuckerberg and his masters. Go away with your progressive ideas like… Allowing women to express themselves.
Well now we know Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Meta, apparently.
Why meta is not fully banned in the EU is beyond me :)
I know banning or forcing meta to obey laws in the US is impossible due to bribes (political contributions), but in the EU I would think meta could at the very least be reined in.
This actually is a result of Meta being forced to obey EU law. Not sure why the article didn't explain things at all, but Regulation (EU) 2024/900 greatly restricts political advertising with typical vagueness, so Meta is enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.
Information like this should be front-and-center. Call it malicious compliance if one wishes, but if there is one thing that is clear, Meta does not do anything (besides try and make money) without being forced to. A blanket ban on anything political does indeed mean a ban on all sides of an issue, even ones many would agree is positive.
The comment you’re responding to and that you want front and center is plainly wrong. The regulation is about transparency and restricting targeted advertising technics for political advertising. That has nothing to do with the situation at hand, it is meta doing something on their own.
And your point about Meta being forced to act is also wrong, companies aren’t just passive institutions that only react to regulations, they constantly take decisions and actions, and regularly manufacture that type of situation as a way to lobby regulators
It doesn't ban political advertising, it requires labeling/transparency, and prohibits targeting without consent or based on categories like race or religion.
It also defines political ad narrowly as placed by a political actor or campaign, or intended to influence some part of the political process, like voting, legislation, or regulatory action.
If that were the case, we wouldn't have far right AI generated political ads everywhere in Facebook. Just one example from France this week[1]
I don't know what motivation Facebook has to automatically limit certain political advertising and not other, but it certainly has nothing to do with EU regulation
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/09/19/the-lucr...
are the things that you linked to adverts? as in, someone paid facebook to promote them in the ad bit? or are they just regular content.
> enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.
that _really_ doesn't seem what is happening
an AD for a theater play is by no standard political advertisement
Political advertisement in the regulations context is reasonable clearly defined.
An AD for a theater play is in general very clearly _not_ covered by it.
To add to it: Civil rights & feminism (in it's official non hijacked definition, aka. equal fair treatment of man and women) are fundamental rights in the EU, something the regulation very clearly states it doesn't want to impeach on. So arguments that you could accidentally misread the regulation to include banning _non-political advertisement about artistic work covering fundamental rights are a bit absurd_.
Anywhere here is the definition of political advertisement in given regulation:
> political advertising’ means the preparation, placement, promotion, publication, delivery or dissemination, by any means, of a message, normally provided for remuneration or through in-house activities or as part of a _political advertising campaign_:
> (a)by, for or on behalf of a _political actor_, unless it is of a purely private or a purely commercial nature; or
> (b) which is liable and designed to _influence the outcome of an election or referendum_, voting behaviour or a legislative or regulatory process, at Union, national, regional or local level;
(emphasis mine)
So to put it simple: Meta is engaging in censure.
Stretching the term political to include more or less everything (like any topic people have opinions about a politician might speak about) is IMHO a pretty dishonest misinterpretation, especially given that it isn't even everything, but "everything Meta doesn't want to get involved with due to the current political environment".
At best this misinterpretation is due to laziness, at worst pushed by malicious actors in the US.
Given that Meta is a US company and the currently people in power there find this topics quit unpleasant and Metas long history of not faithfully complying with law and allowing all kind of ADs this looks very bad for them.
"Designed to influence…voting behaviour" is incredibly vague. A play with political undertones could absolutely fit that definition. I understand that's not what was intended by the law, but if someone was advertising plays with support for policies you didn't like, you likely would be calling that political.
More relevantly, a broad, vague policy means an EU regulator can prosecute Meta whenever they feel like it if Meta does not go overboard.
the law came into effect due to widespread advertising campaigns on facebook by someone (often thought to be russian government based) for both sides of any culture war topics, presumably to drive division. Things like simultaneously advertising BLM/ACAB + thin blue line.
> so Meta is enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.
No. Meta enforces a broad ban because they don't want EU to regulate them, so they drag their feet and create the most possible "unwanted collateral damage" so people will get upset at the regulation instead of the company. So, pieces like this from The Guardian are surely needed.
> create the most possible "unwanted collateral damage"
Other examples of this bullshit being cookie consent dialogs and Apple acting like a victim for being forced to open their platform a bit.
If cookie consent dialogs have been going on for as long as they have, can they really be called malicious compliance at this point? Seems like people believe that is the actual intent of the regulation at this point.
Tell a lie enough times...
I personally see fewer and fewer of those original dialogs that had you deny 20-30 items one by one. Most of the pages I land on have the deny all button or have given up on pretending they care.
Like they've famously obeyed GDPR?
Meta aren't 'forced' to do anything other than treat the fines imposed by their lack of adherence to the laws of the territories they operate in as a BAU cost. Meta's profits run roughly the same as the GDP of Paraguay ($60.46 billion in 2025) - i.e. that Country's total value added by an economy through wages, profits, and taxes. Their revenue is on track to exceed the Ukrainian GDP next year.
This year Meta will pay up to $16.7bn to settle landmark US legal actions as result of not obeying US law, reporting $2.4 billion in legal fees in Q2 alone.
The sum total of the EU fines issued (read: appealed and not collected) likely won't even exceed Metas legal fees for the 2026 calendar year; i.e.:
* April 2025 - €200m (DMA "consent or pay" advertising model)
* November 2024 - €797.72m (Antitrust re:Facebook Marketplace)
* September 2024 - €90m (Storage of user passwords in plaintext)
* May 2023 - €1.2b (Unlawful EU-U.S. user data transfers)
* January 2023 - €390m (Forcing personalized ads via terms of service)
* December 2022 - €251m (2018 data breach and system design lapses)
* November 2022 - €265 (Inadequate protection against data scraping)
* September 2022 - €405m (Instagram children's privacy)
> Not sure why the article didn't explain things at all
The answer is right in front of your eyes: theguardian.com
How is a Virginia Woolf play "political advertising"?
No, showing ads for feminism or social issues related plays is not illegal in Europe. Nor fined. And it is practically practiced all around the Europe.
This strategy of "we will lie about what the law enforces, so that we can blame the regulator instead of the company" is getting old.
We just need to start pirate streams of football games and it will be gone within the week.
> Why meta is not fully banned in the EU is beyond me :)
It’s pretty simple - the EU is unable to produce alternatives. This is because they don’t have the software talent for it.
Any talent they do have immediately runs for the SF Bay Area of the United States at the first opportunity.
You want good alternatives to Meta’s products? Pay engineers a competitive salary.
And no, the lower cost of living doesn’t even remotely begin to make up for the difference in comp. Same with healthcare - it’s effectively free in the United States for people who have jobs, especially so for SWEs.
Why would you want alternative to meta's product ?
To have the ability to ban Meta.
I'm not saying it's not bad in the USA (because it is) but if you think there's no corruption or bribing in EU politics then I don't know what to say.
Although both continents are presently losing themselves to fascism, quantity still has a quality all its own.
You're on the right track but instead of losing themselves to fascism what you should more accurately be pointing out, in my opinion, is that in general societies are becoming a lot more open to authoritarian ideologies, whether that's communism, fascism, or similar.
Why do you think so many big tech companies are registering subsidiaries in Ireland? (Aside form the "Double Irish" mechanism that used to be in vogue more than a decade ago).
Plenty of hands seem to be well greased over there given how long it takes to issue fines for clear&cut violations of EU regulation.
So, Meta should be banned because it followed EU law to ban some things?
Wow, Europeans do have a penchant for recursively banning things :)
No. Supranational corporations will find any and all ways to be maliciously compliant and blame the EU.
Neither feminism nor social issues are banned in European advertissements.
Probably got better publicity with this ban then if they actually showed the ads.
My money is that this is manufactured by some PR team.
Possibly the Ad's text was purposely inflammatory (something like "overthrow the patriarchy" or something) so that they can say it was banned.
Yes, Meta has consistently acted with integrity and has earned the benefit of the doubt in situations like these. It's safer to assume that the massive PR team working for this one-woman play in Spain has manufactured the whole thing, including the damning quotes, which the Guardian has somehow published without properly verifying.
The guy you’re responding to is acknowledging FB’s crap practices and is suggesting a PR team may be using that to their advantage for guerrilla marketing. Not an insane suggestion, actually savvy and common in our modern rage landscape.