Meta to close Threads in Turkey to comply with injunction prohibiting data-sharing with Instagram

Meta said it plans to “temporarily” shut down Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by Turkey’s competition authority last month over how Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram.

The Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), known as Rekabet Kurumu, released its findings on March 18, noting that its investigations revealed that Meta was abusing its dominant market position by combining user data that create a Threads profile with those from their Instagram account – without giving the user the choice to sign up.

This is the latest in a long line of regulatory battles Meta is facing in the European region, after being fined $267 million for GDPR violations by WhatsApp in the European Union (EU) , while it was also forced to sell its $400 million Giphy. acquisition from Shutterstock for $53 million, on the grounds that the deal reduced competition.

Mesh data

However, today’s news is more relevant when Turkey fined Meta $18.6 million in 2022 for combining user data on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In January this year, the Turkish TCA announced that it would fine Meta an additional $160,000 each day for non-compliance with the previous order, with the TCA arguing that a notification message sent by Meta to users regarding its data sharing practices was insufficient. and lacked transparency.

So this latest skirmish is not exactly unprecedented.

As a reminder, Instagram, Facebook’s sister company, launched Threads last summer, largely to capitalize on the exodus of Twitter users following Elon Musk’s controversial takeover. Although Threads has amassed 130 million users today, a constant criticism is how it requires users to create an Instagram account in order to get a Threads profile.

Initially, the only way Meta allowed users to delete a Threads profile was to delete their entire Instagram account, although it later introduced a separate deletion mechanism for those who wanted to abandon their Threads profile only. As part of its regulatory compliance measures for the delayed EU rollout of Threads, Meta introduced a “no profile view” feature for the EU market last year, providing users with limited access to the network social without having to create an account.

Meanwhile, Turkish regulators announced a new investigation in December into how Meta linked Threads to Instagram, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer. In its interim report, the TCA writes:

• Since META has been in the market for many years, it has a comprehensive and detailed data accumulation.

• The size and diversity of META’s user base makes META’s services attractive to advertisers.

• This situation allows META to allocate more resources to the development of services and makes it difficult for competitors to access advertisers and therefore financial resources. In this context, META’s activities create a barrier to entry into the market.

• Additionally, META operates as an ecosystem with the core and related services it offers, allowing META to transfer the power and knowledge it gains from each service to another service and increase its market power.

And that brings us to today’s announcement that Meta will delist Threads, at least temporarily, pending further legal discussions and resolutions between the two parties.

“We do not agree with the interim order, we believe we comply with all Turkish legal requirements and we will appeal,” Meta wrote in a blog post today. “The TCA’s interim order leaves us with no choice but to temporarily close Threads in Turkey. We will continue to work constructively with the TCA and hope to bring Threads back to the people of Turkey as soon as possible.

Until April 29, everyone using Threads in Turkey will receive a notification about the impending shutdown and will be given the choice to delete or deactivate their profile. The latter of these options means that a user’s profile can be resurrected in the event of Threads being reinstated in Turkey.