> There is no EU regulation forcing Meta to ban anything.

They didn't claim that. Many EU regulations don't actually ban the thing, but make it more expensive, cumbersome, risky, etc... This has a similar effect as censorship, but doesn't imply there is some law that say "it is illegal to say X".

I did not say the EU forces Meta to ban it; perhaps you should re-read the comment.

It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.

You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).

The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.

I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.

They didn’t claim the EU regulations forced Meta to ban anything. They claimed Meta decided “the juice is not worth the squeeze” when it comes to compliance. I don’t know who’s right to be fair, but I haven’t heard about any other instances of this with Meta, have you? What is it about this particular case? Never heard of this happening in the US. Possibly just an isolated incident blown out of proportion?

The words of the TTPA:

> liable and designed to influence the outcome of an election or referendum, voting behaviour or a legislative or regulatory process, at Union, national, regional or local level

Now, we all agree feminism is an important civil rights topic and Virginia Woolf should be (and is) celebrated in the western world. But how can a platform that is explicitly not allowed to permit advertising for political or social causes be allowed to run paid ads about "feminism" especially while Equal Pay for Equal Work is such a hot-button political issue [1] all over Europe?

So on the one hand we have the EU saying that no political or cause-centric advertising is permitted, and on the other hand the regulation is so overly broad that it is left up to everyone else to "figure it out".

As a result, and as we see here, most social media has just chosen to ban it all completely.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...

This seems like a distinction without a difference. The EU gets to choose their rules and Meta gets to make business decisions about how to comply with those rules. One can complain about either, I suppose.

I don’t know how the cost-benefit analysis happened within Meta when considering approaches but presumably they would rather be getting paid to show more ads rather than not being paid. Their policies may also change over time as they invest more in their systems or if the rules change.

Ultimately it seems to me like the real problem was that the advertiser in this case was quite tiny and the representative they spoke to perhaps didn’t do a great job of explaining the issue (and the customer was too insignificant to justify a more high-touch approach). Presumably if you’re paying a lot more for advertising you can get better treatment and perhaps Meta would also appropriately label political ads if you were wanting to spend a lot on them.

> The EU requires political ads to be labeled and restricts how targeted they can be.

This doesn't sound like a good thing. Why shouldn't a political group be able to target people who are going to care the most about an issue/politician with an ad? Basically Meta has too good of a profile, so they aren't able to target ads. I would want to know personally, if Politician X is for/against a policy I feel strongly about.

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