Meta has filed a notice of appeal against a Lagos High Court judgment that found it unlawfully profiled Nigerian Facebook and Instagram users for behavioural advertising without their genuine consent. The company lodged the appeal on September 30, five days after Justice A.F. Pokanu of the Ikorodu Judicial Division ruled against it in a case brought by the Incorporated Trustees of Laws and Rights Awareness Initiative and five individual Nigerians. The judgment ordered Meta to stop the unlawful processing, bring its Nigerian operations into line with the Nigeria Data Protection Act within eight weeks, and pay $100,000 in general damages plus ₦1 million in costs, a fraction of the $200 million the applicants had sought.
The dollar figure was never really the point, which is exactly why Meta is fighting it. Meta’s defence rested on a simple argument: Facebook and Instagram are free, advertising-funded products, so collecting and profiling user data for targeted ads is a necessary part of the bargain users accept when they sign up. Justice Pokanu rejected that reasoning outright, holding that behavioural advertising is ancillary to running a social network rather than essential to it, and that broad terms-of-service acceptance cannot stand in for the specific, informed consent the law requires before a company can build an advertising profile on someone. The court also rejected Meta’s claim that routing Nigerian data through servers abroad absolves it of responsibility, finding that users have no control over where their data travels and that Meta, as the data controller, remains on the hook for unauthorised cross-border transfers regardless. That is the reasoning now headed to the Court of Appeal, and if it survives, it would apply well beyond six plaintiffs.
This was also not Meta’s first loss in this specific case. Six months before the September ruling, Facebook Nigeria Operations Limited tried to intervene in the same suit and was turned away by the same judge, who described the subsidiary’s motion as that of “a mere busy meddlesome interloper” since it had never been named as a party or served with court papers, and ordered costs against it. The September judgment was the conclusion of a fight Meta’s side had already been losing procedurally since March.
It’s worth being clear about where this judgment sits among Meta’s other Nigerian troubles, because it’s actually the smallest of them by far. In July 2024, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission fined Meta $220 million after a 38-month investigation into discriminatory data practices, a penalty Nigeria’s Competition and Consumer Protection Tribunal upheld in April 2025. The Nigeria Data Protection Commission separately fined Meta $32.8 million in February 2025 for conduct that reads almost like a preview of this case: using behavioural advertising without explicit consent, processing non-users’ data, skipping mandatory compliance audits, and transferring data abroad without authorisation. The Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria added roughly $37.5 million on top of that over unapproved adverts, bringing the combined regulatory exposure to around $290 million, enough that Meta warned in mid-2025 it might be “forced to effectively shut down” Facebook and Instagram in Nigeria rather than comply, a threat it was still repeating as recently as August and has not acted on. Facing almost identical underlying allegations at the regulatory level, Meta chose to settle with the NDPC in October 2025 rather than keep fighting. Facing a much smaller judgment on the same substance from an actual court, it’s appealing instead, which says something about what Meta is really trying to protect: not $100,000, but a legal finding that a Nigerian court, rather than a negotiable regulator, can tell it how consent has to work.
Nigeria isn’t alone in arriving at this conclusion, either. The European Commission fined Meta €200 million in April 2025 for a “consent or pay” advertising model that failed to offer users a genuinely equivalent, less personalised alternative under the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Austria’s Supreme Court went further in December 2025, closing out an eleven-year case brought by privacy campaigner Max Schrems, and ruled that Meta’s claim that tracking was “necessary” to provide its service didn’t meet the bar for valid consent under European data protection law. Those rulings rest on different statutes than Nigeria’s Constitution and its 2023 Data Protection Act, but they land on the same basic principle Justice Pokanu applied: an advertising-funded business model doesn’t automatically make ad tracking mandatory, and a company can’t bundle consent to profiling into the fine print of simply being allowed to use an app.
What happens next is genuinely open. Nigerian appeals can take months to resolve, and nothing here is guaranteed to hold up at the Court of Appeal. But the underlying question, whether more than 160 million Nigerian internet users get a real legal claim to meaningful consent before being profiled for ads, or whether Meta’s terms of service remain enough cover on their own, is now squarely before a higher court, and whatever it decides will shape how the company’s other unresolved Nigerian disputes get argued from here.
