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
