Spanish court orders Meta to pay nearly half a billion euros in damages to media outlets

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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Spanish legacy media companies in Spain scored a victory against social media giant Meta after a Madrid-based court ordered Thursday that it must pay news outlets nearly half a billion euros in damages.

According to a court statement, the mercantile court No. 15 of Madrid ruled that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant had exercised an unfair market advantage by extracting personal data of internet users in violation of European law and using it to create more effective advertising.

The parent company of Instagram and Facebook will have to pay 481 million ($554 million) in damages to 81 Spanish media outlets which brought the suit to court.

“The illicit treatment of this enormous quantity of personal data meant Meta had an advantage that Spanish online media could not match,” the court wrote in a statement. “Meta’s actions harmed the online advertising revenues of Spanish digital media outlets.”

The court agreed with the Spanish media outlets that Meta had violated European regulations for five years, before the American company updated its legal base of consent on compiling personal data in 2023 to bring it in line with European law.

The 2018 EU rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, require companies that collect personal data of users to adhere to technical and organizational measures aimed at protecting user privacy.

Meta said it will appeal, calling the ruling “baseless.”

“This is a baseless claim that lacks any evidence of alleged harm and willfully ignores how the online advertising industry works,” Meta said in a statement. “Meta complies with all applicable laws, and has provided clear choices, transparent information and given users a range of tools to control their experience on our services.”

This is not the first time Meta has run afoul of the EU data norms. In 2022, Irish regulators slapped Meta with a 265 million-euro (then $277 million) fine for breaking them.

The Spanish court said that its ruling could influence other legal cases in Europe, including in France where Meta faces a similar case.

Meta has been pushing for the EU to loosen its regulations, which offer better protection to users than in the United States.

Last week, Spain’s financial markets supervisor has slapped Elon Musk’s X with a 5 million-euro ($5.8-million) fine for allowing an unauthorized cryptocurrency platform alleged of using fraudulent publicity to advertise on the social media network.

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AP business writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this story from London.