Google will also stop serving political ads in the EU starting this October.
Meta will be ending political, electoral and social issue advertising in the EU. The move comes ahead of new EU regulations on transparency around political advertising, set to become effective from 10 October 2025.
In a blog post on 25 July, Meta said that the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation “places extensive restrictions on ad targeting” creating an “untenable level of complexity and legal uncertainty” for advertisers and platforms.
The TTPA aims to address information manipulation and foreign interference in elections. The regulation also seeks to clamp down on the processing of personal data for political ads.
According to the incoming regulation, political ads must be clearly labelled and include information on who paid for it. The ads are also required to display which election or political process it is linked to, as well as disclose whether targeting ad-delivery techniques were applied in reaching the user.
Under the new regulation, targeting or ad delivery will only be permitted if users give explicit and separate consent for their data to be used in political ads.
Special categories of personal data, such as race or ethnicity and political opinions cannot be used for profiling. In addition, personal data of minors cannot be used and the data of a user who is at least one year under their national voting age is also prohibited.
The TTPA also places a ban on political ads coming from sponsors outside the EU in the three months leading up to an election or referendum.
Meta, as well as other social media platforms, already have some tools in place which provide transparency around political ads. Meta said that since 2018, advertisers who run political ads are required to provide details to prove who they are and where they live. These ads also include a “paid for by” disclaimer.
However, the TTPA introduces “significant, additional obligations”, Meta said. It claims the regulation is “yet another threat to the principles of personalised advertising” and said that altering its services will render them ineffective.
“Once again, we’re seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market, reducing choice and competition,” Meta said. The platform has come under repeated fire by the EU over its use of personal data for advertising.
In 2024, Google – in a similar statement – said that the TTPA “introduces significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms”. The company said that it will stop political ads in the region starting this October.
Late last year, the EU launched an investigation into TikTok after a tumultuous round of presidential elections in Romania which saw the victory of far-right and pro-Russian presidential candidate Călin Georgescu.
A part of the investigation is probing the platform’s policies on political ads and paid-for political content, which the social media platform said it prohibits.
While earlier this year, TikTok introduced changes that better detect and label political accounts ahead of another set of presidential elections in Romania in May.
Georgescu, however, was banned from running in the round, after intelligence revealed Russia had been involved in setting up hundreds of TikTok accounts backing him.
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