The social media giant followed Google’s parent company Alphabet to make a similar decision in November.
Meta will suspend advertising on political and social issues on the European Union platform starting in October.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced new policy changes on Friday, citing legal uncertainty over the block’s new rules regarding political ads.
The Silicon Valley-based social media giant follows in the footsteps of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
EU laws called transparency and targeting of political advertising (TTPA) regulations, which will be applied from October 10th, have been spurred by concerns about disinformation and foreign interference in elections across the 27-country bloc.
The law requires large tech companies to clearly label their platforms political ads, and clearly label who paid it, how many elections are targeted, or risk fines up to 6% of annual revenue.
“From early October 2025, we will no longer allow advertising on EU platforms for political, electoral and social issues,” Mehta said in a blog post.
“This is a difficult decision. It was adopted by us in response to EU transparency and targeting political advertising (TTPA) regulations, bringing important operational challenges and legal uncertainty.”
Meta said EU rules would ultimately hurt Europeans.
“We believe personalised advertising is important for a wide range of advertisers, including campaigns to inform voters about important social issues that shape public discourse,” it said.
“Levelations, like TTPA, significantly undermine the ability to provide these services. They not only affect the effectiveness of advertisers’ outreach, but also their ability to access comprehensive information.”
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are currently being investigated by the European Commission for allegedly tackling disinformation and deceptive advertising in the preliminary stages of the 2024 European Parliament elections.
The EU probe is based on the Digital Services Act. This requires more to do to combat illegal and harmful content on the platform or risk a 6% fine of global annual sales.
Bytedance’s Tiktok is also at the crossroads of the EU, where the Romanian presidential votes are suspected of failing to tackle election interference in November last year.
Meta’s political ads have long been a concern in the US. Last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg settled a lawsuit filed by shareholders over alleged privacy violations.
The lawsuit allegedly failed to comply with the Federal Trade Commission’s settlement in 2012 to protect consumer privacy. The lawsuit was during the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when the social media giant provided user data to the company without consent for political advertising purposes.