Meta Is a Criminal Company. It’s a Disaster That It Continues to Operate in the EU.
When will the EU Commission wake up?
I can’t think of a single benefit for any country to rely on Meta’s services to connect people digitally and inform citizens about their societies and the world. In essence, Meta is a criminal company. It feeds on users’ negative emotions, misinformation, fraud, addiction, privacy violations, and of course, tax evasion, without returning anything of value to the societies it has digitally invaded.
In the New York Times bestseller “Careless People,” ex-Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, lays out in great detail what we have already known for years: at every turn since Facebook’s conception, the management has prioritized profits over the public good, while publicly denying it and pretending otherwise. If a Nobel Prize was ever awarded for ignorance, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg should be among the prime candidates.
The pattern has persisted throughout Meta’s twenty-year history: move fast and break things → deny harms → apologize → repeat. But while the company continues to grow in size and impact year-on-year, the harms become more glaring, and foreign lawmakers continue their role as passive, impotent bystanders, pretending to be as clueless about social media technology now as they were when Facebook spread throughout the world like a pandemic in the late 00s.
According to recently leaked documents, Meta projected that 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, corresponding to $16 billion. Further, Meta estimates that it shows users 15 billion ads a day that are “high risk” scam advertisements (Reuters). Remember, these numbers only account for fraudulent ads, not fraudulent social media posts or the notorious billion-dollar pig butchering scams that plagued WhatsApp for years.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Meta is the number 1 digital industry lobbyist in the EU, spending more than $10 million on lobbying efforts in 2025 (Corporate Europe Observatory). Is this the real reason why the EU Commission is so hesitant to take a stance against Meta? Regardless, new, cute digital regulations or fines which Trump mockingly refers to as “digital taxation” are not going to make any difference at all. Drastic measures are needed and they can’t be implemented fast enough.
That the EU, which prides itself on digital regulation, high privacy standards, and human rights protection, continues to rely on Meta as a primary provider of social media services, is nothing less than a disaster. Meta’s monopoly ensures that European or national competitors can never emerge, even though creating better and healthier alternatives to Meta’s platforms would not be difficult. In fact, it would be easy. If a teenager could build the foundation for Facebook in a dorm room over a few days, surely the combined corporate powers of the EU can do it too, and hopefully much better.
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, who is a leading analyst of AI and emerging tech on Substack and LinkedIn.
