Facebook and Instagram could close in Europe. No, this is not clickbait, but what is clear from the latest report published by the parent company Meta. Within the annual report drawn up for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has written down its concerns about being able to continue its operations on our continent.
A decision that is linked to 2018, the year in which the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR, came into force in Europe. In a nutshell, what this European regulation does is place constraints on the processing of Europeans’ personal data.
By consulting the aforementioned report published by Meta, it is clear that the normal use of Facebook and Instagram in Europe could cease precisely because of these constraints. In 2020, the Irish division of the company was criticized in this sense: the data of European users can no longer be transferred to the USA and must remain within the European borders.
However, according to Meta, this would not be possible, as it would significantly hinder its business of profiling and advertising tracking, a model that allows services such as Facebook and Instagram to be free.
Meta says that if the law is not changed and it cannot continue to transfer data from Europe to the US, it will probably not be able to offer some of its most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe. A sentence that knows more of a threat than a concrete possibility, also because such a closure would represent a severe financial blow but above all a media blow.
Also because 2021 was not a particularly positive year for Meta: for the first time in 18 years, Facebook recorded a drop in users. Not to mention the blocking of advertising tracking put in place by Apple, due to which Facebook expects losses of 10 billion dollars in 2022.
All news that obviously had repercussions also in finance, with the Meta title suffering a decline of -26% on the stock exchange. Not a small blow for Mark Zuckerberg, who lost something like 29 billion dollars in the space of a few hours.