Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1451754
OPINION 17.2.2022 Alexiei Dingli Prof Alexiei Dingli is a Professor of AI at the University of Malta and has been conducting research and working in the field of AI for more than two decades, assisting different companies to implement AI solutions. He forms part of the Malta.AI task-force, set up by the Maltese government, aimed at making Malta one of the top AI countries in the world M eta Platform Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Ins- tagram, and WhatsApp, has threatened to pull the plug on its plat- forms from all of Europe. is threat is because of a spat they have with the Euro- pean Union. And all because of a problem which Facebook caused! Let me explain. e problems started a few years ago when Cambridge Analytica, a rel- atively unknown and obscure compa- ny, was set up. ey claimed to be a "global election management agency", thus handling the online campaigns of major political parties worldwide. Although in principle, there's nothing wrong with that, they didn't just pro- mote political parties, but they abused and manipulated citizen data for their gain. ey used a vulnerability within Facebook to gather as much informa- tion as possible and then show users a twisted version of reality. Pumping millions of euros to portray the polit- ical candidate on their payroll as the best and his opponent the worse. Of course, no one could compete with them, and this system led to President Trump's election in the U.S., the tri- umph of Brexit in the U.K., and hun- dreds of other manipulated elections around the globe! In response to the misuse of person- al data, which has been going on for a while, the E.U. published the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a set of rules for collecting and process- ing personal information from individ- uals in Europe. e recent issue with Facebook seems to stem from the fact that one of these regulations forbids the transfer of data on E.U. citizens back to the U.S. Of course, whether this threat mate- rialises or not is yet to see; however, I highly doubt it. Let me explain why. First of all, we experienced a similar showdown when Australia passed the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which forced platforms to pay publishers if they host their content. e law is a re- sponse to years-long complaints from news outlets worldwide. eir content is being shared online by Facebook, Google, and others, earning them lots of money, but the publishers get noth- ing! And this is at a time when print journalism is in decline. In response, Google made deals with Australian news publishers, but Face- book decided to cut off the entire con- tinent made of 26 million people. Of course, Facebook didn't take long to realise their mistake. Less than a week later, Facebook was on again in Aus- tralia, and they agreed to pay Australi- an media companies for news content. So when considering that Facebook has almost 3 billion users, can they just switch off their services on the E.U. (with a population of 450 million citizens)? I doubt any company would be ready to forego such a big chunk of their earnings. is leads us to the second reason. For the first time ever in the past dec- ade, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, forecasted weaker earnings. So much so that the value of their stock plummeted 26% in its most significant one-day drop ever, making them lose billions of dollars. ere are various factors for this; the new Apple privacy changes, the steady decline in adoles- cents on Facebook and many others. Facebook is also being threatened by other social networks such as TikTok. Since its inception almost 5 years ago, TikTok has just become the world's most downloaded social media app and the most visited website world- wide. Furthermore, there is a growing glob- al animosity towards social media. Var- ious scientific reports confirmed the toxicity of social networks, and many governments are worried about their effect. Bruno Le Maire, the French Fi- nance Minister, was even quoted on Euronews saying that: "I can confirm that life would be very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without it." So I doubt any company going through such a turbulent time will be willing to keep on digging their own grave. Finally, whoever follows tech knows that Facebook is at a stage where it has to reinvent itself. is was very evi- dent with their rebranding into Meta. ey invested heavily in Virtual Reality (V.R.) and believe that the Metaverse is the future of social media. So their ob- vious strategy is to expand further into this new territory. Can a company with such an ambition dismiss 450 million citizens? And not just any citizens but people who have access to finances, ed- ucation or technology. ey automati- cally fall within their cohort of prime customers who will buy their technolo- gies, use them, and create content. So to summarise, in my opinion, Facebook will never leave Europe. ey can't just dismiss such a large chunk of people, they can't give further economic blows to their company, and they can't jeopardise their future ex- pansion plans. Of course, this doesn't mean that it is a good thing since the harmful effects of social media on our society still need to be quantified. But for all of you hooked on to it, you can rest assured that most probably, you'll keep on enjoying social media, at least for the near future. Why Facebook will never leave Europe German Economy Minister Robert Habeck (left) and French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire insisted Meta needs to abide by the new EU regulations or else its social media platforms would be banned across Europe