Meta has announced that it will suspend Threads in Turkey from April 29. This decision was in response to an interim injunction filed by the Turkish Competition Authority (TCA). The agency filed the injunction last month over the way platforms under Meta Threads and Instagram share data.
Meta set to temporarily suspend Threads in Turkey
The TCA, also known as Rekabet Karumu, noted that after its investigations, it discovered that the company combines the data of users who sign up on Threads with their Instagram account. The agency noted that the company is abusing its dominant market position by not allowing its users to choose if they want to opt in or not.
This present dilemma is one in a long list of the regulatory hurdles that Meta has faced across the European market. In 2021, the company was asked to pay a fine of $267 million over WhatsApp GDPR violations in the European Union (EU). It was also forced to Giphy, a service that it had acquired for $400 million, to Shutterstock for $53 million due to competition offenses.
The company’s European regulatory struggles
This new struggle did not come without an earlier scuffle. Meta was slapped with an $18.6 million fine for combining the data of its users across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. The TCA announced earlier this year that Meta would have to pay a fine of $160,000 per day if it refused to conform with the earlier order.
The agency clarified that the notification that the company said it sent to users over its data-sharing model was insufficient. Meta launched Threads last year after several users on X were threatening to boycott the platform after the controversial takeover by its present owner Elon Musk. Although the platform announced hitting 130 million users, Meta has faced criticism for forcing users to sign up for an Instagram account before they access the Threads app.
Initially, users who intend to delete their Threads account would need to forfeit their Instagram account, but the company introduced a feature to address that concern.Meta was hesitant to launch Threads in the EU market due to the regulations in the region but soon rolled out a ‘view without profile’ feature for EU users last year when it launched.
