The judgement requires Meta to change their platforms within 2 weeks so that the user's choice is persistent. If not implemented in 2 weeks, there is a daily penalty of €100'000, up to a maximum of €5 million.
As a European, I’m glad that the influence of big, potentially dangerous companies is being kept in check. From the start of October, Meta is completely switching off political ads and now I can look forward to my feed stopping with tabloids, politics and Russian propaganda and going back to technical curiosities and capybaras.
Please for the love of god make it a legal requirement that messaging must be made available as a separate app without addictive feeds. Or make it such that users can disable the feed in settings. We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
I use an extension called Unhook which has, as one of its many great options, a mode that disables the algorithmic youtube feed and auto-redirects the homepage to your subscriptions page (which is just reverse-chronological)
(it also lets you disable Shorts and suggestions and so on, pretty fantastic actually)
They need to just ban the ad model and make subscriptions (including free with no ads, if the provider wants it) mandatory.
I don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work, and it's been so long now that their incorrect assumptions (the feeds are free and the greedy providers shove ads in them) have turned into bedrock beliefs.
You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads. Which covers the cost of your continued usage. If you don't like it, don't use instagram. If you really don't like it, lobby for the law to make it illegal, but get your credit card ready for another monthly subscription.
There was a time I'd sub to YouTube. however they ditched the sub for that and force YouTube music as well with all of its enshitified user experience I want none of it.
What I can't understand is how the ads are still effective, targeted or otherwise.
I've long thought we are going to reach a point where the return on social advertising isn't worth the investment, these models have a crisis and pivot, but it still seems to be going strong.
Even that's not enough with the shadow profiles they build on people without accounts. It's more like "if you don't like it, don't use instagram and also make sure none of your friends, coworkers, family, associates, or anywhere you go doesn't use it either. Also make sure you, nor the others mentioned, visit any website using Meta's pixel."
We definitely need laws when an individual effectively can't opt out because of network effects.
I actually think ad based funding models is probably one of the most destructive forces in our society. Do you think politics would be so insane right now if fear based click baiting wasn’t so profitable?
> You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads.
It's not quite that simple though. The problem is that they are not simply showing you relevant ads, they actively attempt to deliver an outcome the ad is trying to achieve.
On the surface this is relatively benign, Nike wants to sell shoes, they run ads and optimise towards shoe sales, and Meta makes that happen.
But what happens when people run political advertising? What happens when crypto companies promote scams?
the only solution is not yo consume things that operate on the model. the difficulty there is that the model is generally adopted. so a massive amount of users will go from 1 to another system only to get rug pulled out from under them again and again.
this can be a business model, economic circumstance, mgmt change. a lot can trigger such a shift in services up to then just fine to use.
most companies did not start out on these premises, and its really hard to tell what service will turn next.
i hope maybe ISPs could handle it and offer it as a service. like an ad free internet. but then they will just more deeply embed the ads and it will still get past. changes in designs of the apps will lead to blocking being ineffective.
so really then all that is left is not to use anything that has potential to identify you and your use of it. thats not a lot of things currently. most are frowned upon if you use it in a lot of regions.
This is also a misunderstanding. Not how it works economically.
You do not pay for Instagram with your personal data. The data is elsewhere, not on Instagram. For example with your local retailer or credit card company.
Instagram pays for data about you, which they buy from other people. You do not have a say in this for the most part. Whether or not Instagram buys this data does not affect its collection.
You pay for Instagram with your time spent watching ads. The data they collect about you is mostly not for ads, it's to get you to spend more time on Instagram
To make it clear why this matters:
If you banned advertising on social media, the amount of data collected about you would not decrease
If they're not making money from ads, they don't have incentive to manipulate you into spending as much time as possible watching ads. Maybe if it's some kind of micropayment based model, but if it's subscription the profit motive would be to get you to use the service as little as possible without unsubscribing.
I get what you're saying but by current EU privacy law interpretation this approach is not allowed.
You can of course charge for services but you cannot charge people just to get rid of tracking. This is not to be confused with ads. You can run ads and offer a paid version without ads. It's about the tracking.
Am I weird because I don't consider, in particular, the tracking nature of ads the biggest problem? Sure, I my browser doesn't share data between websites, I delete cookies automatically except whitelisted, and I don't give apps permissions for no good reason. But the problem with ads is their display, not the contents.
Early Google style text box ads were fine. Any ad put on the side of the page with no animated elements is probably fine. But in reality ads are intrusive and those block my mental process when I'm trying to read about of focus on something. Especially ads in videos would just make me focus really, really hard on blocking off the message until I can restore my mental stack and continue with the original video. (I can't watch youtube with ads, for that reason.) Anything that pops up, takes space, or requires me to find an X button to shut them off gets me to C-w the browser tab nearly without exception.
If the ads do behave I don't particularly mind. I even used to peruse ads in print magazines. In fact, untargetted ads are generally complete shit and if the "inter Net cloud thing" has even an inkling of what I might be interested at all, that's all the better I think. I don't ever click on ads though, so I'm probably not part of the prime target audience. But meaningful ads may make me add their products in the comparison set if I'm in the process of buying something similar.
This is government overreach. These are novelty/fun apps. They are not critical infrastructure or needed in any way. This would be like a court ordering a local bar to serve more than just beer and wine, to accomodate people who like sake and soju. You have free choice to use the social platforms that you want to use. Really don't understand this kind of action tbh.
This is true when there’s plenty of competition that matter. When everybody and every business is in one app, the network effect forces everyone to be there or be invisible. So the “essential infrastructure” label is kinda debatable. I suppose it’s essential for many businesses.
So your analogy should be more like there’s one big shopping mall network in the city that basically everyone has to go because certain stores are only there — and the owners bought any competitor that seemed to start becoming popular in the past so there’s no perspective of competition either.
I've switched to email and chat for social connection, works a lot better for me than I think any ranked feed ever will, no matter how many court decisions try to shape it.
I would like them (or actually the EU) to go one step further:
All people should see the same information, in the same order, with the same metadata such as likes and comments.
Example:
I go to Reddit. I see a list of only the subreddits I subscribed to. This is fine. But within this subreddit, I should see the same information as other users do.
Currently, you don’t even see the same comments and same replies, likes, dislikes on topics. This puts people in bubbles, and makes it impossible to enforce fair reporting, illegal content or manipulation.
Something I think is worth pointing out: this is happening in the Netherlands, i.e. their jurisdiction. I think most people here aren't from the Netherlands. I think they should be free to try out the legislation they want, and people elsewhere don't need to agree. It's good that different countries can try different things, and if that doesn't work it's a lesson for other places, and if it works that's even better. People on the internet tend to focus too much on uniformity and conformity, as if we lived everyone in the same place.
The headline is provocative. The issue is simple: Meta has a recommended feed and another feed which is reverse chronological. The option is hidden and not default, and all the NL judge is asking is for that option to be preserved and not be reset everytime user opens the app/website. Instagram never had this option, this does not say whether they have to implement it too.
I would be curious if the order stands as for curation as well. Someone could have 1000s of friends, and you cant show posts from everyone in a reverse chronological order for a good ux.
in my not so humble and often overly verbose opinion, we desperately need to get back to a place where we have more control over what our own inputs.
a handful of people are now in control of the overwhelming majority of what we see. whether that’s the few websites most people visit or the wildly merging media ecosystem which is now also overwhelmingly controlled by a tiny few with even more mergers on the immediate horizon. to the corporate live event space. it’s insane that weve allowed such a tiny few to control nearly everything our people ingest.
anything which counters this stranglehold on our inputs is a good thing, no matter how small.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadThe judgement requires Meta to change their platforms within 2 weeks so that the user's choice is persistent. If not implemented in 2 weeks, there is a daily penalty of €100'000, up to a maximum of €5 million.
https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/2025/10/02/judge-in-the-bits-of...
(it also lets you disable Shorts and suggestions and so on, pretty fantastic actually)
I don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work, and it's been so long now that their incorrect assumptions (the feeds are free and the greedy providers shove ads in them) have turned into bedrock beliefs.
You pay for instagram with your personal data, which is used to target you with high value ads. Which covers the cost of your continued usage. If you don't like it, don't use instagram. If you really don't like it, lobby for the law to make it illegal, but get your credit card ready for another monthly subscription.
I've long thought we are going to reach a point where the return on social advertising isn't worth the investment, these models have a crisis and pivot, but it still seems to be going strong.
Even that's not enough with the shadow profiles they build on people without accounts. It's more like "if you don't like it, don't use instagram and also make sure none of your friends, coworkers, family, associates, or anywhere you go doesn't use it either. Also make sure you, nor the others mentioned, visit any website using Meta's pixel."
We definitely need laws when an individual effectively can't opt out because of network effects.
It's not quite that simple though. The problem is that they are not simply showing you relevant ads, they actively attempt to deliver an outcome the ad is trying to achieve.
On the surface this is relatively benign, Nike wants to sell shoes, they run ads and optimise towards shoe sales, and Meta makes that happen.
But what happens when people run political advertising? What happens when crypto companies promote scams?
this can be a business model, economic circumstance, mgmt change. a lot can trigger such a shift in services up to then just fine to use.
most companies did not start out on these premises, and its really hard to tell what service will turn next.
i hope maybe ISPs could handle it and offer it as a service. like an ad free internet. but then they will just more deeply embed the ads and it will still get past. changes in designs of the apps will lead to blocking being ineffective.
so really then all that is left is not to use anything that has potential to identify you and your use of it. thats not a lot of things currently. most are frowned upon if you use it in a lot of regions.
You do not pay for Instagram with your personal data. The data is elsewhere, not on Instagram. For example with your local retailer or credit card company.
Instagram pays for data about you, which they buy from other people. You do not have a say in this for the most part. Whether or not Instagram buys this data does not affect its collection.
You pay for Instagram with your time spent watching ads. The data they collect about you is mostly not for ads, it's to get you to spend more time on Instagram
To make it clear why this matters: If you banned advertising on social media, the amount of data collected about you would not decrease
I get what you're saying but by current EU privacy law interpretation this approach is not allowed.
You can of course charge for services but you cannot charge people just to get rid of tracking. This is not to be confused with ads. You can run ads and offer a paid version without ads. It's about the tracking.
For me the tracking is a lot more harmful than the ads. Ads are much more noticeable but tracking is a lot more insidious.
It's really that tracking that I want to see gone
Early Google style text box ads were fine. Any ad put on the side of the page with no animated elements is probably fine. But in reality ads are intrusive and those block my mental process when I'm trying to read about of focus on something. Especially ads in videos would just make me focus really, really hard on blocking off the message until I can restore my mental stack and continue with the original video. (I can't watch youtube with ads, for that reason.) Anything that pops up, takes space, or requires me to find an X button to shut them off gets me to C-w the browser tab nearly without exception.
If the ads do behave I don't particularly mind. I even used to peruse ads in print magazines. In fact, untargetted ads are generally complete shit and if the "inter Net cloud thing" has even an inkling of what I might be interested at all, that's all the better I think. I don't ever click on ads though, so I'm probably not part of the prime target audience. But meaningful ads may make me add their products in the comparison set if I'm in the process of buying something similar.
So your analogy should be more like there’s one big shopping mall network in the city that basically everyone has to go because certain stores are only there — and the owners bought any competitor that seemed to start becoming popular in the past so there’s no perspective of competition either.
All people should see the same information, in the same order, with the same metadata such as likes and comments.
Example:
I go to Reddit. I see a list of only the subreddits I subscribed to. This is fine. But within this subreddit, I should see the same information as other users do.
Currently, you don’t even see the same comments and same replies, likes, dislikes on topics. This puts people in bubbles, and makes it impossible to enforce fair reporting, illegal content or manipulation.
I would be curious if the order stands as for curation as well. Someone could have 1000s of friends, and you cant show posts from everyone in a reverse chronological order for a good ux.
in my not so humble and often overly verbose opinion, we desperately need to get back to a place where we have more control over what our own inputs.
a handful of people are now in control of the overwhelming majority of what we see. whether that’s the few websites most people visit or the wildly merging media ecosystem which is now also overwhelmingly controlled by a tiny few with even more mergers on the immediate horizon. to the corporate live event space. it’s insane that weve allowed such a tiny few to control nearly everything our people ingest.
anything which counters this stranglehold on our inputs is a good thing, no matter how small.