In June, we worked together on a bipartisan basis to pass a package of sweeping reforms out of the House Judiciary Committee to tame Big Tech. It is fundamentally about what kind of society we want to live in, and whether we have an economy where businesses fighting for economic survival to create better products and a better future can succeed. On Instagram, the company's internal studies show that nearly a third of "teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," while "13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram."įinally, as the Facebook outage from last week made clear, the company operates as essential communication infrastructure for billions of people, underscoring the massive scope of this problem.Īt the same time, the internet has grown more hostile to the type of competition and innovation that is necessary to contest the dominance of Facebook and other platform monopolies.Īt its core, this issue is not just about a market failure or consolidation. Haugen testified, "there is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself."Īs a result, WhatsApp has become a ubiquitous messaging platform that often serves as a firehose for propaganda, causing civil unrest around the world. In the absence of competition or accountability, Facebook and other unregulated tech monopolies have no incentive to change, making the Internet less safe and less secure.Īs Ms.
Instead of having the type of competition and choice that would make Facebook a more trustworthy company, users are stuck without alternatives as surveillance and exploitation have become the business model of the internet. Since then, we know what the real cost of this consolidation has been. Less than a year later, Instagram's cofounders reportedly left the company after Facebook refused to provide it with adequate resources to safeguard users' health and safety on the platform.
In each instance, these changes were designed to spur addiction at the expense of user privacy, security, and safety.Īs a result of Facebook's efforts to monetize WhatsApp through targeted ads and commercial messaging, the company's cofounders resigned in 2017. In the wake of these acquisitions, Facebook began pushing changes to WhatsApp and Instagram that degraded these products, making WhatsApp less secure and Instagram less safe. In other internal documents, Facebook's senior executives likewise described the company's mergers and acquisitions strategy in 2014 as a "land grab" to "shore up our position." In documents obtained by the subcommittee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the company's former chief financial officer in 2012 that the purpose of acquiring nascent competitors like Instagram was to neutralize competitive threats and to maintain Facebook's dominance. Similarly, before it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram focused on improving the quality of its platform rather than simply increasing virality at all costs.Īs Sarah Frier wrote in "No Filter," Instagram's founders opposed adding a re-share button because it would give it "less power to demonstrate model behavior everyone would just be focused on going viral."Īlthough neither of these transactions were challenged by antitrust enforcers, we now know that Facebook acquired these companies - as well as others - as part of a well-documented pattern of killing their competition. As they said in June 2012, "when advertising is involved you the user are the product." Prior to being purchased, WhatsApp's founders specifically rejected building the company around surveillance advertising and extracting users' data. WhatsApp and Instagram would be different companies with different incentives had they not been acquired by Facebook. Over the past decade, antitrust enforcers have been asleep at the switch as Facebook entrenched and expanded its dominance through acquisitions of its competitive threats.
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