Following a preliminary ruling from the Turkish Competition Commission, Meta Platforms said on Monday that it will temporarily halt its social media platform, Threads, in Turkey beginning on April 29.
Meta announced the update in a Monday post.
Rekabet Kurumu, the Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), announced on March 18 that the results of its investigations indicated Meta was abusing its dominant market position by merging user data from Instagram accounts with Threads profiles without offering users the option to opt-in.
This is the most recent of Meta’s many regulatory conflicts in the European Union.
The company was obliged to sell Giphy, which it had purchased for $400 million, to Shutterstock for $53 million because the transaction limited competition.
In addition, the corporation was fined $267 million for violating the GDPR in the European Union (EU) in 2021.
“The TCA recently issued an interim order prohibiting the sharing of data between Threads and Instagram. We disagree with the interim order … and we will appeal,” said Meta in a statement.
“The TCA’s interim order leaves us with no choice,” the statement continued while emphasising the company’s plans to “constructively engage” with the authority in hopes of eventually bringing back the social media platform.
At the moment, users’ Threads posts from the app may be viewed on the Instagram app, which is generally regarded as a strategy to boost user numbers and foster collaboration between Meta’s two platforms.
The Threads app takes advantage of Instagram by emphasising it as a necessary component for users to begin using it. This allows users to instantly follow every account on Threads that they are already following on Instagram.
Meta stated that although it would be stopping the app’s usage in Turkey, it still thought the software complied with the data rules of the nation.
We earlier reported that Meta Platforms released information regarding the upcoming iteration of their proprietary AI accelerator hardware.
The company disclosed the development on its official page as it is investing billions in its own AI research to overtake competitors in the generative AI market.
