Meta executives lobbied United States trade officials to fight an expected fine in Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (April 1), citing unnamed sources.

The fine is likely to accompany a cease-and-desist order from the European Union, the report said. At issue is whether Meta should be forced to allow Facebook and Instagram users to access those platforms for free without seeing personalized ads, something that would sap Meta’s chief source of revenue.

Meta hopes to convince the President Donald Trump administration, which is preparing for a new round of tariffs that will affect the EU, to push back against what the company argued would be a discriminatory move, according to the report. The goal is to get the European Commission to relax its stance on how Meta must comply with its decision.

“This is not just about fines — it’s about the commission seeking to handicap successful American businesses simply because they’re American, while letting Chinese and European rivals off the hook,” a Meta spokesperson said, per the report.

A spokesperson for the EC said officials enforce the bloc’s laws equally for all companies that do business in the EU, no matter where they are based, according to the report.

Meta in 2023 offered users in the EU, European Economic Area and Switzerland a choice between free access with personalized ads or a paid ad-free subscription. However, regulators flagged the policy for not complying with the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

The company then made some modifications, offering reduced subscription prices in November. However, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) said those changes were superficial and Meta’s practices remained misleading. It called on regulators to investigate a policy it called “binary” and “pay-or-consent.”

Meta’s efforts are a case of CEO Mark Zuckerberg “calling in a favor” to the White House after making several concessions to then-candidate Trump during the 2024 election, the WSJ report said.

While Zuckerberg never formally endorsed Trump, he was part of a group of CEOs attending the president’s inauguration in January after donating $1 million to the inaugural fund.