The EU Commission has charged the social media giant Facebook Inc. with providing misleading information during its takeover of the popular messaging service WhatsApp.
Facebook Lied About Buying WhatsApp
In February 2014, WhatsApp suffered a fall that affected millions of users around the world. It was three days after the purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook Inc. The transaction was closed last October with a final price of 21,800 million dollars.
This acquisition has taken place for about 3,000 more than the planned figure million due to the rise in the value of the shares of the social network in recent months. Under the agreement, 2,000 million dollars in shares go to the founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum.
With this purchase, the company Mark Zuckerberg has an app that currently already over 1,000 million active users. But now Facebook is a problem in Europe because the European Commission is launching a serious public accusation.
The accusation comes from Brussels suggests that Facebook provided “misleading information” to get the approval for the purchase of WhatsApp. The European Commission has initiated a possible process to penalize the Zuckerberg network for this reason and has sent it a statement of charges to be explained in a deadline that will end on 31 January.
Margrethe Vestager, Competition Commissioner states that the result of the preliminary analysis is that Facebook provided misleading or incorrect information while the investigation took place about buying WhatsApp. Vestager states that “Facebook now has the opportunity to respond”.
If the arguments and explanations that Facebook does not satisfy the competition authorities, the fine imposed could reach 1% of the turnover of the social network. While the European Commission was investigating whether the acquisition of WhatsApp would be a competition problem, Facebook said it would not make any automatic association of users of both platforms.
But during the last August, the network of Zuckerberg made it possible to share data with users of WhatsApp and Facebook, which had much impact and that various countries have managed to pause.
This makes Brussels wonder if Facebook lied then by intentionally misleading information. So now the social network should give appropriate explanations to avoid being punished, but for now buying WhatsApp is maintained.
