Meta Mulls Charging for Ad-Free Content

Meta Platforms, the parent company of popular social media platform Facebook, is mulling charging $14 per month for ad-free subscriptions to Instagram and Facebook for European users. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Meta has submitted a proposal for this to regulators such as the Irish Data Protection Commission, digital competition regulators in Brussels, and EU privacy regulators.

The proposal outlines a subscription no ads (SNA) plan that gives users the choice to select personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram or pay for ad-free services. According to the WSJ report, Meta plans to charge European users around 10 euros (or $10.46) for a monthly subscription to Facebook or Instagram on desktop, with around 6 euros added for each additional account. However, the report estimates that the subscription price may rise to roughly 133 euros per month on mobile devices, due to commissions charged by Apple”s and Google”s app stores on in-app payments.

Earlier, Reuters reported that Meta Platforms had used public posts on Facebook and Instagram social media platforms to train its new Meta AI virtual assistant. However, the company excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers” privacy. This was revealed by the company”s top policy executive, Nick Clegg, in an interview with Reuters during the company”s annual Connect conference.

According to Mr. Clegg, Meta did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model. The company also took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training, to ensure that users” privacy is not compromised by the AI assistant.