Over 80 Spanish media outlets have filed a $600 million lawsuit against Meta in a commercial court in Madrid, citing company’s ‘massive’ and ‘systematic’ use of its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms to promote an unfair advantage for advertisers.

According to VOA, the case filed by the Association of Media of Information, a consortium of Spanish media companies, on behalf of the media organisations, claimed Meta allegedly violated EU data protection rules between 2018 and 2023.

The lawsuit alleges Meta used its three social media platforms to provide an unfair advantage of designing and offering personalised advertisements with AMI, saying between 2018 and 2023, Spanish newspapers and magazines had recorded $539.2 million in income lost.

“This loss of income has meant it is more difficult for the media to practise journalism, to pay its journalists, to mount investigations and to hold politicians to account for corruption,” Irene Lanzaco, director general of AMI told VOA on Wednesday.

“It means that society becomes more polarised, and people become less involved with their communities if they do not know what is going on,” she said.

The latest lawsuit is a total deviation from the traditional legal battles between social media companies and media organisations over intellectual property theft and related issues as the outcome of the AMI lawsuit against Meta may create a new legal precedent.