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Meta has launched a fresh legal challenge against Britain’s media regulator in the latest of a slew of actions by social media companies who are accused of using the courts to slow down implementation of the Online Safety Act.
Lawyers for the parent company of Facebook served notice during the week in an appeal against placing WhatsApp and Instagram, which are also owned by Meta, in a category that subjects them to additional duties.
Those additional responsibilities include greater transparency, more user controls, measures to protect users from fraudulent advertising and increased recording of illegal content.
The move comes against the backdrop of hostility on the part of US tech corporations, and Donald Trump’s White House, over the fees and fines regime Ofcom is enforcing under landmark digital safety legislation.
Meta launched a legal challenge in London in May, claiming that Ofcom’s methodology for calculating the charges was flawed and should not be based on a company’s global revenue.
Breaches of the Online Safety Act can be punished by fines of up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) or £18m – whichever is higher. Ofcom is funding the operating costs of carrying out its online safety work by drawing on a proportion of that revenue.
Other legal action is being taken by TikTok and X over how much information the companies need to give Ofcom to carry out its job of monitoring their services.
A senior director at the regulator told a committee in the House of Lords on Tuesday that Ofcom was “operating in a highly litigious environment”, including facing two actions by Meta and others from “a raft of services” bringing judicial reviews against the body for trying to collect data.
“We absolutely are looking to drive change in the best way we can,” Oliver Griffiths, the Ofcom group director for online safety, told peers hearing evidence about the Online Safety Act. “We have all come to work to make this happen, but, if we run unnecessary risks, we are going to get absolutely clobbered legally by deep-pocketed individuals and firms.”
Speaking about the latest legal challenge, a spokesperson for Meta said: “Like many others in the industry, including TikTok, Roblox, X and Quora, we are challenging specific aspects of implementation.
“These are not challenges to the law itself, but how Ofcom has interpreted it. This is a normal feature of any new regulatory regime being bedded in and ensures questions of process, scope and implementation get settled so the law is applied proportionately, accurately and consistently.”
Lisa Nandy, the secretary for digital, culture, media and sport, vowed last week to keep introducing legislation to govern the internet. “I think we’re going to have to start getting used to the idea, actually, that government is going to be far quicker, far more interventionist, and I think I’m going to have to see the law updated regularly because tech is changing so fast that we’ve got to be able to respond,” she told the Sky News Electoral Dysfunction podcast.
