The Meshchansky District Court of Moscow partially satisfied the claim of Russian bloggers against Meta (recognized as extremist and banned in Russia) and ordered the American company to pay the plaintiffs a total of 4.5 million rubles, 3 million rubles. of which – the costs incurred by them for targeted advertising, the correspondent of Vedomosti reports from the courtroom.
The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 by 15 applicants. The appeal to the court was initiated by the social movement Council of Bloggers, its founder Valeria Rytvina specified. She also represented the applicants in court.
Through the court, as follows from the text of a copy of the lawsuit (available to Vedomosti), the bloggers demanded that Meta return the funds spent on targeted advertising on Instagram and Facebook (owned by Meta, blocked in Russia). They acquired it to promote their publications on these social networks back in 2021 and early 2022. After March 4, 2022, when Meta turned off the targeting for Russians, the applicants were deprived of the opportunity to use the already paid inventory, Rytvina explained.
The plaintiffs are sure that in this way Meta violated the law “On the Protection of Consumer Rights”, and demanded to pay them 18 million rubles. Of these, 15 million rubles. – compensation for non-pecuniary damage, expressed, as follows from the text of the claim, “in moral suffering, stress due to the fall in coverage in social networks.”
“Following the disabling of Meta’s ad targeting feature, due to the loss of predictable promotion of posts and stories on social media, plaintiffs were forced to look for new sources, invest additional money in this, and change internal processes,” the lawsuit says.
Meta Platforms Inc. there is no legal entity in Russia, therefore, the income of the corporation in Russia is not disclosed in open sources. In December 2021, the Magistrate’s Court of the Tagansky District of Moscow imposed a negotiable fine on the company for repeated failure to remove illegal content in the amount of RUB 1.99 billion, or 1/20 of the company’s total income for the year preceding the offense. Thus, in 2020, Meta’s revenue could amount to 39.8 billion rubles.
The main part of Meta’s earnings in Russia is formed by its advertising revenue, Karen Kazaryan, director of the Internet Research Institute, explained to Vedomosti earlier.
The entire advertising market in Russia at the end of 2022 amounted to 392 billion rubles. (excluding the TV segment, for which data were not disclosed), of which 324.9 billion rubles fell on advertising on the Internet, follows from the data of the Association of Communication Agencies. The market for influencer marketing and native advertising, according to the Association for the Development of Interactive Advertising (ARIR), in 2022 amounted to 12 billion rubles.