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Meta Threatens To Pull Facebook And Instagram Out Of Nigeria Over $290 Million Fine Imposed For Violation Of Local Privacy Laws
from the behaving-badly dept
It’s hardly a secret that Meta is an unpleasant company. That’s reflected both in terms of what happens behind closed doors, and its actions in the market. Some of its attempts to bully nations or even large economic blocks are well documented. But its threats outside Western markets are just as reprehensible, though less well known. For example, the Rest of the World site reports on a major confrontation between Meta and the authorities that is currently taking place in Nigeria:
Local authorities have fined Meta $290 million for regulatory breaches, prompting the social media giant to threaten pulling Facebook and Instagram from the country.
As with earlier EU fines imposed on the company, the sticking point is Meta’s refusal to comply with local privacy laws:
The [Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC)] said Meta committed multiple and repeated infringements of the country’s Nigerian rules, including “denying Nigerians the right to control their data, transferring and sharing Nigerian user data without authorization, discriminating against Nigerian users compared to users in other jurisdictions, and abusing their dominant market position by forcing unfair privacy policies.”
After remediation efforts failed, the FCCPC issued its final order in July 2024, imposing a $220 million fine along with penalties from other agencies that took the total amount to $290 million. Meta appealed the decision, but the plea was overturned in April, prompting the company’s threat to withdraw its services from Nigeria.
The fine itself is small change for Meta, which had a net income of $62 billion on a turnover of $165 billion in 2024, and a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion. Meta’s current revenues in Nigeria are relatively small, but its market shares are high:
According to social media performance tracker Napoleoncat, Meta has a massive presence in the country, with Facebook alone reaching about 51.2 million users as of May 2024, more than a fifth of the population. Instagram had 12.6 million Nigerian users as of November 2023, while WhatsApp had about 51 million users, making Nigeria the 10th largest market globally for the messaging app.
Since many Nigerians depend on Meta’s platforms, the company might be hoping that there will be public pressure on the government not to impose the fine in order to avoid a shutdown of its services there. But it is hard to see Meta carrying out its threat to walk away from a country expected to be the third most populous nation in the world by 2050. In 2100, the population of Nigeria could reach 541 million according to current projections.
Even though the dispute in Nigeria has received little attention in the Western press, it involves a number of important issues such as privacy, national sovereignty and the future demographics of the online world, all of which have a global dimension. It also provides yet another instance of Meta behaving badly.
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Filed Under: africa, facebook, fccpc, fines, infringement, instagram, meta, nigeria, population, privacy, social media, whatsapp
Companies: meta
Comments on “Meta Threatens To Pull Facebook And Instagram Out Of Nigeria Over $290 Million Fine Imposed For Violation Of Local Privacy Laws”
I just read a Naomi Klein interview where she makes this observation about Silicon Valley billionaires:
I definitely get a bit of a “how dare you peasants question me” vibe from this kind of reaction.
Which is kind of funny considering how quickly Zuck folded when Trump threatened to put him in jail.
Re:
Musk definitely thinks his wealth gives him the right to control the world. He tries so hard to be liked/respected/thought of as funny and it never works, and it’s easy to see how much he hates that. Hell, he bought Twitter specifically because he got owned so hard on it that he decided to become its permanent center of attention, thinking that would stop people from mocking him. And lo and behold, his cunning plan fell apart so badly that whenever he makes a big change to Twitter, it’s likely because someone used the functionality he’s changing to either reject him or make him look like a doofus.
Re: Re:
Yeah, he’s just so fucking needy.
There’s something to be said for the traditional evil billionaires, your Murdochs and your Kochs, who straight up don’t give a fuck if people hate them, or even enjoy it.
Don’t worry much like Apartheid Jimmy I’m sure if China or India or Turkey or Russia or some other authoritarian country asked they would gladly bend over and ask for more.
Imagine what would happen to any small time person who committed a crime and was ordered to pay a fine but refused and said “I’ll just move away then”. They would be immediately thrown in jail.
End corporate citizenship if they don’t have the same consequences of breaking the law as the rest of us.
The fact that there is this much money in advertising is strictly ridiculous.
I wish Meta would threaten (and follow through) to pull Facebook and Instagram out of the US.
Re:
Maybe they could convince Elon to do the same with X, too.
Good riddance?
Mark the Paranoid Mandroid throws a tantrum at the potential (very rough guess based on 2024 gross profit) loss of maybe 3/1000ths of a percent profit.
Wanker!
Meta should hire hackers to break into computers and change to a lower amount then pay off that lower balance
Trump needs to do that to erase the warrants iran has on him for the airstrip on that general 5 years ago
He has the money I don’t know why he does not do that
That is the risk he takes when he travels outside
Have Iran’s computer networks and interpol hacked abd those warrants erased
The idea of a President vance scares me more than Trump
Once they are erased out of Iran’s computer networks and out of Interpol’s computer network that will be the end of that.