A landmark double legal precedent has been set against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), has ordered the tech giant to pay $375 million in damages, finding that the company prioritized profits over safety and concealed what it knew about the potential harmful effects of its apps. According to the state attorney general, who initiated the proceedings, After seven weeks of hearings and just one day of deliberation, the jury found that Meta violated state consumer protection laws by failing to disclose the potential harms of its apps. Specifically, they pointed to risks of child sexual exploitation and consequences for the psychological development of young children. New Mexico law allows a maximum of $5,000 for violations of this type, so the total is based on the 37,500 violations the jury determined, taking into account the number of minors who could have suffered these consequences. Beyond the amount—relatively small for a corporation that generated $200 billion in revenue last year—this is the first time a state has won against a major technology company for harm to minors. And it opens the door to similar lawsuits across the United States.The verdict comes as Meta faces two other major legal proceedings. The first is in California, where the alleged permissiveness of Meta's platforms in blocking minors from accessing the platform has been judged. For now, the jury has concluded that the big tech He is guilty, but the sentence and any potential compensation have not yet been made public. The case stems from a complaint filed by a 20-year-old woman who suffered from an addiction to the group's social media platforms, which began when she was six years old. The young woman received her first mobile phone at age nine, which has also sparked debate about parental responsibility. According to records, she spent up to sixteen hours a day on the apps. The plaintiff also accused Google, owner of YouTube, which attempted to argue that its video-on-demand service could not be considered a social network.

Organizations advocating for child safety online are celebrating a significant victory. After years of controversy, Meta has agreed to prevent communications between Instagram users from being encrypted. The change was introduced discreetly, with an unpublicized update, and will begin to be implemented in May. The modification of this clause will allow the company that manages one of the most followed social networks by young people to view the content of messages sent by users if required by judicial authorities.

Mark Zuckerberg has put an end to the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was supposed to be the gateway to his metaverse. He announced it last Tuesday on Meta's official forums and in emails to users. It's no surprise: it's the formal liquidation of a project that had been agonizing for years and never surpassed 300,000 monthly active users; a ridiculous figure for a company that hosts 3 billion humans on its platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg has put an end to the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was supposed to be the gateway to his metaverse. He announced it last Tuesday on Meta's official forums and in emails to users. It's no surprise: it's the formal liquidation of a project that had been agonizing for years and never surpassed 300,000 monthly active users; a ridiculous figure for a company that hosts 3 billion humans on its platforms.

Last Tuesday, the Council of Ministers decided enough was enough: after months of watching how the artificial intelligence tools of big tech companies became automatic generators of child pornography, the Spanish government has ordered the State Attorney General's Office to investigate X, Meta, and TikTok for possible crimes of sexual abuse of minors. Let no one say they weren't warned: when users of Grok, Elon Musk's AI, created 3 million sexualized images in 11 days – 23,000 of which showed minors – perhaps someone in Silicon Valley could have suspected that things weren't going well.

Pedro Sánchez is not backing down and is taking another step in the crusade against Big Tech. The Spanish government on Tuesday asked the Public Prosecutor's Office to investigate X, Meta (which includes Facebook and Instagram), and TikTok for the sexual violence crimes they may be committing in the creation and distribution of child pornography using their artificial intelligence (AI) tools. "These platforms are threatening the mental health, dignity, and rights of our sons and daughters. The State cannot allow this. The impunity of these giants must end," Sánchez himself stated early in the morning in a message published on X.

The renewal of Isidre Fainé's contract as head of the La Caixa Foundation has been the highlight of this week's business appointments; we've discussed it in the ARA economics section with a special report on the La Caixa scandal, which you can read in the newspaper. However, in the US, Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has appointed Dina Powell, former advisor to Donald Trump, as the company's new president and vice president; and locally, the consulting firm Newlink has opened a new office in Barcelona and a new director. These are the week's most notable appointments:

When you opened WhatsApp on Thursday morning, you might have encountered a surprise that has gone largely unnoticed in the media, but which represents a minor earthquake in our digital lives. That iridescent blue circle that Meta embedded a few months ago at the top or bottom of chats has changed its behavior. Until four days ago, if you dared to address it in Catalan, Mark Zuckerberg's artificial intelligence (AI) would respond with a curt "no" in Spanish or Englishclaiming that it wasn't programmed for our language. It was a stubborn and technically absurd refusal, because the model that makes the device work (Llama 4) has been trained by reading the entire internet and, therefore, knows Catalan for some time now.

The GAFAM companies have become the emperors of the new world. Each of the initials stands for Google (also known as Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, and Microsoft, in that order. They are the American tech giants, where they have grown under the protection of successive governments, particularly those of Donald Trump. In fact, across the Atlantic, they are referred to as the "magnificent seven," a list that includes Nvidia and Tesla. Their power extends beyond the economic sphere—as was evident at Trump's inauguration in 2025—something that has not gone unnoticed by some governments, including Spain's. Indeed, Pedro Sánchez began the year speaking of a "tech elite" and urging the European Union to "stand up to it." He initiated a challenge to the major tech companies, a challenge he has revived eleven months later.

The Commercial Court No. 15 of Madrid has ordered Meta to pay €479 million to 87 Spanish digital newspaper publishers and news agencies belonging to the AMI (Association of Information Media), including ARA. The ruling states that Mark Zuckerberg's multinational company gained a competitive advantage by including advertising on its Facebook and Instagram social networks using users' personal data protected by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The decision responds to a lawsuit filed by the national digital press association, which argued that the improper use of users' protected personal data gave Meta an unfair advantage. The court ruled in favor of the association and ordered Meta to pay a multimillion-euro fine for unfair competition.

The world of finance is beginning to dwarf planet Earth. This was stated by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson in his book. The triumph of money (Debate, 2011, updated in 2024). Over the years, this trend has solidified, and the financial economy is outpacing the real world. A prime example is the large technology companies in the United States, especially those most closely related to artificial intelligence (AI). These are companies that have surpassed historic price levels and are beginning to raise alarms not only about the existence of a bubble, which no one doubts, but also about its potential bursting.

The major digital platforms (the big techThey dominate the economy. Digital technology has become indispensable, whether for information retrieval, social networking, e-commerce, operating systems, or smartphones. Each of these fields is dominated by a few companies. The leaders are Google with its search engine; Meta in social networking with WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram; Amazon in e-commerce; Microsoft with Windows and applications; and Apple in mobile phones. High fixed costs, network effects, and dynamic economies of scale (e.g., in the learning curve) make these companies increasingly competitive. big tech are dominant. The accumulation of data leads to feedback effects, in which more production and more sales induce more data and more network effects that make the company more efficient, improve products and services, and stay ahead of competitors. They are, therefore, markets that migrate towards a winner that takes the whole market or most of it (winner-takes-alleitherwinner-takes-most).

"I worked there [at Facebook] for seven years, and if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say it started out as a hopeful charade and ended in tragedy, filled with darkness and regret. I was one of the people advising the company's top brass, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as planets thought like planet, as they thought. hopeless as they kowtowed to authoritarian regimes like China and deceived the public as if nothing. had given them that power and behaved."

Meta, Mark Zuckerberg's company and owner of Instagram and WhatsApp, would have appropriated the image and names of famous people such as Scarlett Johansson, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Anne Hathaway to create a dozen chatbots for social media that were dedicated to flirting with users and sharing sexually explicit images. According to a Reuters exclusive, Zuckerberg's company created these chatbots without the permission or knowledge of those affected.

Just a few days ago, Amazon announced plans to build a gigantic data center in the state of Indiana, United States. This computing center will be dedicated to training artificial intelligence systems with the goal of simulating the human brain. The electricity bill will be expensive, as this complex will consume approximately 2.2 gigawatts of electricity—enough to power an entire city.

The Catalan multinational blood products company Grifols is embarking on a new era. The company is considering returning to dividend payments and has seen its share price rise after the shock caused by the attacks from the short-selling fund Gotham City Research. At this week's shareholders' meeting, the current chairman, Thomas Glanzmann, retired after 19 years on the board of directors. For the first time, a woman is assuming this position: Anne-Catherine Berner.

A few weeks ago, at an institutional event in Brussels, a digital policy expert celebrated that Europe's commitment to defense opened a window of opportunity for European artificial intelligence. But he warned: "We will need a lot more data than we have now." No one in the room seemed to have any problem. No one mentioned that one of the most important principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is precisely that of limiting data collection to what is strictly necessary.

This week, the social technology company Meta began using data from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users to train its artificial intelligence models. Users, they say, can opt out by filling out a form. In the world of so-called data protection, to protect your data, you supposedly have to fill out additional forms. Although it's also somewhat naive to believe that in the world of social media, smartphones And despite all the technological steps we must take, our data remains protected. Right now, to be free from the manipulation of data thieves, you'd have to live in a permanent blackout or in a self-sufficient house as isolated as possible. I'm talking about our context, obviously. And the lack of credibility generated by these companies, with extremely strange principles that we have assumed as our own. normal, like not being able to show women's nipples, but explicit violence in its most unpleasant forms is. Of course, outside of social media, it also happens that if a man walks shirtless on the street, it's considered normal And if a woman does it, it's considered, at the very least, provocative. Breasts are a clear example of the lack of evolution. And mind you, I'm in favor of everyone wearing clothes on the street. I don't mess with individual tastes; we wouldn't end up. But dressed. Now, if a man shows an uncensored photo of his torso on Instagram, a woman should be able to do exactly the same. Having made this discriminatory note about nipples, we're back where we were. The data. Protected. On social media. Don't make me laugh, I'm ready to go back to nipples.

The European Commission (EC) has announced a €500 million fine for Apple and another €200 million for Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) for violating the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in March 2024. The sanctions come amid a trade war between the United States and the rest of the world.

Meta will use content posted by users of its platforms, such as an Instagram photo or a Facebook comment, to train its AI features, such as Meta AI, the assistant for WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Zuckerberg's multinational explained this in a statement on April 14: "Today we are announcing our plans to train AI in Meta using public content, such as public posts and comments, shared by adults, from our products available in the EU. People's interactions with Meta AI, such as questions and queries, are also shared."