Meta says ‘absolutely not leaving Europe’

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 09/02/2022

It made headlines all around the world for the last couple of days: Meta is threatening to leave Europe. Based on an original interpretation of an abstract from Meta’s annual report, all major news outlets reproduced the story.

But late Tuesday night came the official announcement, by Meta’s Vice President for Public Policy in Europe, Markus Reinisch: Meta is absolutely not threatening to leave Europe – only super unhappy with the E.U. data privacy policy, a short version of the announcement would be:

“Last week, as we have done in our previous four financial quarters, we disclosed that continuing uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms poses a threat to our ability to serve European consumers and operate our business in Europe”, Reinisch says.

“We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe; of course we don’t. But the simple reality is that Meta, like many other businesses, organisations and services, relies on data transfers between the EU and the US in order to operate our global services”.

The exact quote from Meta’s annual report that sparkled the discussions is as follows:

On the pricing side, we expect growth to be negatively impacted by a few factors:
– First, we will lap a period in which Apple’s iOS changes were not in effect and we anticipate modestly increasing ad targeting and measurement headwinds from platform and regulatory changes.
– Second, we will lap a period of strong demand in the prior year and we’re hearing from advertisers that macroeconomic challenges like cost inflation and supply chain disruptions are impacting advertiser budgets.
– Finally, based on current exchange rates, we expect foreign currency to be a headwind to year-over-year growth.
In addition, as previously noted, we also continue to monitor developments regarding the viability of transatlantic data transfers and their potential impact on our European operations.

According to Statista, Facebook had 22 billion Daily Active Users in 2021 in Europe; to put that into perspective, when in the quarterly report for Q4 2021, Meta reported daily active users of 1.929 billion in the fourth quarter, down from 1.930 billion in the third, just that drop caused a more than 20% drop in the share. 

So, as European politician Axel Voss, one of those who helped to draft the proposed E.U. privacy rules, tweeted: 

“Meta cannot just blackmail the EU into giving up its data protection standards. Leaving the EU would be their loss.” 

Moonshot News had at an early stage decided not to run the story about Meta threatening to leave Europe, as we could not find any solid information that backed up such an interpretation or any data that such a decision would make business-wise. So, we decided against reproducing it, as we judged that it was just an interpretation by another medium and not concrete information.