Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp says it may be forced to shut down its operations in Nigeria after a tribunal insisted that it must pay the $220 million slapped on it in July 2024.
Meta’s social media platforms — WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram — are among the most popular in the country.
Meta was also asked to pay the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) an additional $35,000 as the “cost of investigation.”
The Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) fined the company N60bn ($37.5m) and the Nigerian Data Protection Commission $32.8m, bringing the total to $290.3m.
The Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal “ruled that the multiple actions by WhatsApp and Meta, for which the Commission made findings of violations, were correctly identified, and that the Commission did not err in making those findings,” Ondaje Ijagwu, a spokesman for the commission, said in a statement.
“The applicant may be forced to effectively shut down the Facebook and Instagram services in Nigeria in order to mitigate the risk of enforcement measures,” Meta said in the court papers.
Nigeria had accused Meta of violating the country’s data protection and consumer rights laws on Facebook and WhatsApp.
The FCCPC’s chief executive officer, Adamu Abdullahi, said investigations carried out in conjunction with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission between May 2021 and December 2023 revealed “invasive practices against data subjects/consumers in Nigeria.”
Abdullahi accused Meta of discriminatory practices, abuse of market dominance, sharing Nigerians’ data without authorisation, and denying Nigerians the right to determine how their data are used.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said in an email statement after the fine was first announced last July that “We disagree with this decision as well as the fine.”
The country had some 164.3 million internet subscriptions as of March, according to figures published on the National Communication Commission’s (NCC) website.
Meta is facing a similar headache in Europe after the EU fined it 200 million euros over its “pay or consent” system, which violated rules on the use of personal data on Facebook and Instagram.
