I try not to write about Meta

But some of the details emerging from the ongoing FTC trial deserve attention

Ever since I wrote a long essay in the New York Times in 2019 calling for the break-up of Facebook, I’ve avoided writing about the company or responding to interview requests that want me to discuss it. I said what I had to say in the essay, and because my career has moved on, I’ve felt it better to focus on the stuff I love — politics, policy, and economics. I don’t want to get pulled into being an armchair critic of a company whose products I barely even use.

That was pretty easy for the past six years, but it’s gotten a lot harder in the past few weeks. That’s not so much because of the book tour for Marketcrafters, but because of the ongoing antitrust trial.

For those who have not been following closely, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed suit against Facebook in 2020, using a similar argument that I tracked in my op-ed: Facebook had abused its monopoly power in social networking to acquire incipient rivals Instagram and WhatsApp in order to squash competition in social networking. Facebook then proceeded to underfund and underdevelop them. (Question for readers: outside of reels, a product copied from Snapchat, how is Instagram or WhatsApp meaningfully different from what you likely started using a decade ago?) The Lina Khan-led FTC developed and refiled the case, and today’s FTC led by Trump appointee Andrew Ferguson is prosecuting it at trial.

In the weeks between the inauguration and the start of the trial last month, Zuckerberg attempted to strike a deal with Trump, visiting the White House on multiple occasions, to no avail. Those visits came after the $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund. The trial opened with him as the initial star witness, and he was on the stand for several days in mid-April.

But the surprises didn’t come then — they’ve come more recently. And they look very bad for Meta.

Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram who worked at Facebook after the acquisition for six years, testified that Facebook had purposefully and consistently withheld resources from Instagram to constrain its growth. Systrom described Zuckerberg as jealous of Instagram’s success, starving the platform so severely that Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger left six years later out of frustration and anger. Zuckerberg “felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, meaning Instagram or Facebook, and I think there were real human emotional things going on.” It may have been latent jealousy, but using market power to starve or neutralize a competitor is illegal, a clear violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

But perhaps more shockingly was the news that emerged from the trial yesterday. As late as 2019, Facebook and Instagram were well aware of how Instagram was being used by “groomers” — adults building trust and emotional connections with minors, usually to engage in sexual or emotional exploitation — and did little about it. A deck from that year makes clear that Instagram recommended two million minors to child groomers to follow, and 22 percent led to a groomer requesting to follow a minor, in just a three month period. Annualizing that number suggests over one million connections established in a year between groomers and kids on Instagram. (If you want day-by-day dispatches from the trial, I highly recommend subscribing to Big Tech on Trial.)

Lawyers for the FTC will almost certainly claim the data proves that Facebook’s chronic defunding of its acquired rival diminished the safety and security of the platform. I have no idea where this case will head, but so far, it’s not looking good for Meta.

I have so many mixed feelings. In the first place, I can’t get my head around why the leadership at any of these companies could allow such blatant abuse of the platform. It also seems clear that Instagram and WhatsApp, if they had remained independent, would have likely grown into juggernauts to compete directly with Facebook’s blue app. But why are we litigating the acquisition of these companies more than a decade later? It took over five years for this case to even come to trial. The fact that the courts cannot move faster is enraging.

But the law is still the law, even if the courts are slow-moving. A more competitive and open market for social networking would spur innovation, improving product quality. It would not be a panacea for the ills of social networking — we still need legislation to repeal Section 230 which provides the platforms unprecedented blanket immunity and a comprehensive privacy bill.

That said, this case seems like it’s not going where Meta would like. In recent months, the courts have declared Google a monopoly not once, but twice, first in search and then on digital advertising. Unless Zuckerberg can strike a quick deal with Trump before this trial ends, it’s not looking good for Meta.