Madrid (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – A Spanish court has ordered that the US multinational tech firm Meta pay 479 million euros to Spanish digital media platforms for unfair competition practices and violation of European Union data protection regulation.
The compensation, which will be given to 87 digital press publishers and news organisations, is related to Meta’s use of personal data for behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram, according to a ruling made by Madrid’s Commercial Court on Thursday.
It claimed that by processing user data illegally, Meta had gained a “significant competitive advantage” in Spain’s online advertising market.
How is the Spanish government responding to privacy concerns?
A day prior, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also announced that a lower house committee would investigate Meta for potential privacy breaches involving its Facebook and Instagram users.
“In Spain, the law is above any algorithm or any large technology platform. And anyone who violates our rights will pay the consequences,”
Sanchez said in a statement.
According to Sanchez’s office, the investigation originates from international research indicating that Meta employed a concealed mechanism to monitor the web activity of Android device users, Reuters reported.
Spain’s government stated that Meta might have breached multiple European Union laws on security and privacy, such as the GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, the DMA, and the DSA. In 2025, Meta’s total ad audience in Europe is estimated at 335.8 million users.
How have previous EU fines shaped scrutiny of Meta?
The European Commission, which declared in preliminary findings in October that Meta had violated its legal duty to provide researchers with sufficient access to public data, has been involved in multiple legal disputes with the US company.
In July of last year, the European Commission charged Meta with violating the DMA in its new pay or consent advertising model, and in 2024, it fined the company 798 million euros for abusive practices that benefited Facebook Marketplace.
“The European Commission has fined Meta … for breaching EU antitrust rules by tying its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and by imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers,”
the European Commission said.
The European Commission took this action two years after accusing the American tech giant of unfairly favouring its classified ads service, Facebook Marketplace, by combining the two services.
In June 2021, the European Union initiated formal investigations into Facebook’s potential anticompetitive behaviour. In December 2022, the EU voiced concerns about Meta’s connection between its online classified ad services and Facebook, its dominant social network.
