Meta to suspend political advertising as EU transparency law looms
Facebook and Instagram's parent company announced the new policy change on Friday, citing legal uncertainty about the bloc's new rules on political advertising.
The Silicon Valley-based social media giant is following in the footsteps of Alphabet, Google's parent company, which made the same decision in November.
The EU legislation, called the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation, which will apply from October 10, was prompted by concerns about disinformation and foreign interference in elections across the 27-country bloc.
The law requires Big Tech companies to clearly label political advertising on their platforms, who paid for it and how much, as well as which elections are being targeted, or risk fines up to 6 percent of their annual turnover.
'From early October 2025, we will no longer allow political, electoral and social issue ads on our platforms in the EU,' Meta said in a blog post.
'This is a difficult decision – one we've taken in response to the EU's incoming Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation, which introduces significant operational challenges and legal uncertainties,' it said.
Meta said the EU rules would ultimately hurt Europeans.
'We believe that personalised ads are critical to a wide range of advertisers, including those engaged on campaigns to inform voters about important social issues that shape public discourse,' it said.
'Regulations, like the TTPA, significantly undermine our ability to offer these services, not only impacting effectiveness of advertisers' outreach but also the ability of voters to access comprehensive information.'
Meta's Facebook and Instagram are currently being investigated by the European Commission over their suspected failure to tackle disinformation and deceptive advertising in the run-up to the 2024 European Parliament elections.
The EU probe is under the Digital Services Act, which requires Big Tech to do more to counter illegal and harmful content on their platforms or risk fines of as much as 6 percent of their global annual turnover.
ByteDance's TikTok is also in the EU crosshairs over its suspected failure to tackle election interference, notably in the Romanian presidential vote last November.
Meta's political advertising has long been a concern in the United States, as well. Last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg settled a lawsuit brought on by shareholders over alleged privacy violations.
The suit alleged that the company failed to comply with a Federal Trade Commission settlement in 2012 in efforts to protect consumer privacy. The lawsuit came amid the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the social media giant gave user data to the firm – without their consent – for political advertising purposes.
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