What would a Europe be without Facebook and Instagram?
This is the threat brandished by Meta, the parent company of these social networks, in an official document sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the stock market regulator in the United States.
A few words that were quickly taken up and relayed in the press.
And yet: "We have absolutely no desire and no plan to withdraw from Europe," said a spokesperson, this Monday, with the Parisian.
"A number of factors can negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement," Meta writes in the filing filed with the SEC, as any publicly traded company is required to do.
And the company lists several potential risks… including European regulations which limit the transfer of data between Europe and the United States and which could force the parent company not to be able to “offer a certain number of our products and services most important ones, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe”.
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Meta refers here to the cancellation of the Privacy Shield in July 2020. “The Court of Justice of the European Union has recognized the nullity of this text, because it was considered that the American legislation is more aggressive than the European legislation on data protection, with the possibility for the authorities to force companies to communicate personal data”, explains Jérôme Dalmont, lawyer at Itlaw.
The cancellation of this text therefore forces, in fact, Meta to “treat data in different ways” between Europe and the United States to comply with the rules, “with totally different operations”, explains the expert.
"Technically, these rules are impossible to implement given the way Facebook works", analysis with Parisian Daniel Ichbiah, journalist specializing in new technologies, author of a biography on the founder of the company, Mark Zuckerberg.
"Meta resumes its speech against the anti-trust rules, after the takeover of Instagram: there would be a technical imbrication such that they could not be separated", continues Jérôme Dalmont.
14% of users in Europe
So should we believe in a departure of Facebook and others from Europe?
According to Meta figures, Europe has 427 million active users there, or nearly 14% of all its users worldwide.
"We have absolutely no desire and no plans 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 US states. United in order to operate global services, a spokesperson for Meta told Le Parisien.
Like other companies, we have followed EU rules and rely on standard contractual clauses and appropriate data protections to operate a global service.
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No project therefore, but a risk all the same registered in the text transmitted to the SEC.
Jérôme Dalmont sees it as “political pressure”.
“It is hard to see Meta depriving itself of the European market, it is more of a threat to push the European Union and the United States to come to an agreement.
" " It's not nothing as a threat, continues Daniel Ichbiah.
When they threaten to leave, thousands of jobs are threatened.
The company announced in October that it wanted to create 10,000 jobs in Europe within five years to work on the metaverse.
In September 2020, Meta – which was still called Facebook at the time – had already threatened to close its services in Europe, after the cancellation of the Privacy Shield and while a decision by the Irish regulator (where the company has its European headquarters for tax reasons) was about to ban the transfer of European user data to the United States.
"It is not very clear for Facebook how, in such circumstances, it would be possible to continue to provide Facebook and Instagram services in the European Union", had explained the company, before repeating in a press release that she did not “threaten to leave”.
Bis repeat?
