Meta threatens to pull Instagram and Facebook in Europe over privacy laws, regulators say ‘please do it’

In a new regulatory filler this month, Facebook’s parent company Meta renewed his threats to fire both Facebook and Instagram in the European Union over privacy laws. EU regulators, however, were quick to call Meta’s bluff, and even went so far as to say that “life is very good without Facebook and we would live very well without Facebook”.

The context here is important. Like Bloomberg Explain, the United States and the European Union are locked in negotiations on plans to “replace a transatlantic data transfer pact that thousands of companies have relied on”. This pact, however, was overturned by the EU Court of Justice in 2020 “for fear that citizens’ data would not be secure” once transferred to the United States.

Thus, the EU and the United States are currently in negotiations for a new pact, and the absence of an agreement between the two parties could cause problems for companies, including Meta. In a new filing this month, Meta renewed previous threats (promises?) that it would be forced to take down both Facebook and Instagram if a deal wasn’t reached.

The company wrote in the filing that it “would likely not be able to offer a number of our most important products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.”

“We have absolutely no desire or plan to withdraw from Europe, but the simple reality is that Meta, and many other companies, organizations and services, depend on data transfers between the EU and the United States. in order to operate global services,” a Meta spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

But soon after Meta’s comments, two senior German and French politicians brushed off the threats.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck told reporters he had been without Facebook and Twitter for four years due to his account being hacked, and that “life has been fantastic” since then. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire added that he can “confirm that life is very beautiful with Facebook” and that “we would live very well without Facebook”.

The Mayor went on to add that big tech companies must “understand that the European continent will resist and assert its sovereignty”. Habeck added that the EU “is such a big internal market with so much economic power that if we act in unity, we won’t be intimidated by something like this”.