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

BARCELONA Spain AP Spanish legacy media companies in Spain scored a domination 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 comment the mercantile court No of Madrid ruled that Mark Zuckerberg s social media giant had exercised an unfair area advantage by extracting personal material 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 million million in damages to Spanish media outlets which brought the suit to court The illicit cure of this enormous quantity of personal evidence meant Meta had an advantage that Spanish online media could not match the court wrote in a comment 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 statistics in to bring it in line with European law The EU rules known as the General Records Protection Regulation require companies that collect personal statistics of users to adhere to technical and organizational measures aimed at protecting user privacy Meta declared 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 declared in a message 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 input norms In Irish regulators slapped Meta with a million-euro then million fine for developing them The Spanish court revealed that its ruling could influence other legal cases in Europe including in France where Meta faces a similar scenario 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 million-euro -million fine for allowing an unauthorized cryptocurrency platform alleged of using fraudulent publicity to advertise on the social media infrastructure AP business writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this story from London Source