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'Colossally Wrong Decision' as Facebook Parent Company Wins Instagram-WhatsApp Antitrust Case
"This court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side."
Nov 19, 2025
Anti-monopoly advocates are warning that a federal judge's ruling in favor of Facebook parent company Meta in a major antitrust case will have negative repercussions for US consumers by allowing Facebook to continue wielding monopoly power in the social media marketplace.
Judge James Boasberg in the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Tuesday that the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not violate US antitrust policy.
Boasberg found that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had not proven Meta holds monopoly power in the personal social networking market, "largely because he folded TikTok and YouTube into the same market and concluded that their popularity reduces Meta’s share below illegal levels," said the American Economic Liberties Project (ALEP).
John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, argued that Boasberg's ruling demonstrates a basic misunderstanding about the economics of the social media market.
"The court's opinion reflects a view of the market that is at odds with how digital-platform power operates today," he said. "Meta systematically acquired emerging competitors precisely because direct, head-to-head competition threatened its dominance. Meta’s consolidation strategy deprived consumers of innovative services and prevented the development of a truly competitive social-networking ecosystem."
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of ALEP, described the ruling as a "colossally wrong decision" that "turns a willful blind eye to Meta’s enormous power over social media and the harms that flow from it."
"These deals let Meta fuse Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into one machine that poisons our children and discourse, bullies publishers and advertisers, and destroys the possibility of healthy online connections with friends and family," she said. "By pretending that TikTok’s rise wipes away over a decade of illegal conduct, this court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side."
Hegde added that it should now fall upon US Congress to "step in and break up Big Tech, prohibit addictive surveillance algorithms, and create the conditions for building a better future."
Open Markets Institute policy counsel Tara Pincock said Boasberg's ruling was "profoundly misguided," and accused the judge of blocking the FTC from reversing a mistake it made last decade when it signed off on Meta's purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.
"Judge Boasberg erred in concluding that Facebook competes with TikTok and YouTube," said Pincock, a former state assistant attorney general in Utah. "I was part of the bipartisan coalition of states that brought this case alongside the FTC in December 2020, and the court’s framing misrepresents what is at stake. This case has never been about generic 'time and attention.' It is about how people connect, communicate, and build communities—and about how a powerful company abused its dominance to protect itself from competition."
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Siding With Trump, Facebook Suspends Chicago Community Group Issuing ICE Alerts
"This is the same company that had policies allowing for chatbots to have 'sensual' conversations with kids, but discussing local law enforcement among neighbors is a bridge too far, huh?"
Oct 15, 2025
Chicago residents in recent weeks have found numerous ways to resist the Trump administration's deployment of hundreds of federal agents in its increasingly violent "Operation Midway Blitz" anti-immigration campaign—with thousands of people marching to demand armed officers leave the city, some physically intervening in arrests, and community members volunteering to patrol their neighborhoods to warn the public when agents are nearby.
But the alliance between Big Tech and the Trump administration on Tuesday interfered with efforts by more than 80,000 Chicagoland residents to show solidarity with immigrants and people of color, as Facebook suspended a community group where people have been tipping off their neighbors when they see US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents in public areas.
Days after far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has gained considerable influence in the White House despite holding no formal government position, spoke out against a group called ICE Sighting-Chicagoland, Facebook parent company Meta suspended the group to stop its 84,000 members from sharing information about impending ICE raids and enforcement actions.
Loomer wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday that "Big Tech executives" such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should "use this as an opportunity to be in compliance and to support President [Donald] Trump’s immigration policies, but they aren’t."
She said the presence of the community group was evidence of Zuckerberg's "leftist subversion of Trump and his policies."
Two days later, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that action had been taken to stop Chicago area residents from discussing the deployment of federal agents.
"Today, following outreach from the [Department of Justice], Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target ICE agents in Chicago,” said Bondi Tuesday.
"If the Facebook posts happen to bother Trump, will they still be uncensored, and will their 'free expression' be protected? If you understand what a Trump suck-up Zuckerberg is these days, you can probably take a wild guess."
Bondi repeated a claim by the Department of Homeland Security that immigration agents have faced escalating violence from protesters in Chicago. Few specific examples have backed up the claim, while ICE agents and other officers have been filmed tear-gassing a residential neighborhood; shooting pepper spray at a priest at a demonstration; slamming a congressional candidate on the ground; and holding a journalist on the ground before shoving her in an unmarked car, ramming into another vehicle while speeding away, and eventually releasing her without charges.
The Chicago Sun-Times noted two examples of immigration officers being injured on the job in Chicago recently: one who said his injuries he sustained during a traffic stop that proved fatal for an immigrant named Silverio Villegas González were "nothing major," and another who "hurt his leg chasing a protester."
The administrator of ICE Sighting-Chicagoland posted a screenshot of messages they had received from Meta, which accused the group of failing to follow Facebook's community standards. The group had never been reported or flagged previously.
Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan—a former campaign adviser for Trump during the 2020 election—told the Sun-Times the group had violated Facebook's “Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime” policy, which bars groups and users from “outing the undercover status of law enforcement, military, or security personnel if the content contains the agent’s name, their face or badge, and any of the following: The agent’s law enforcement organization, the agent’s law enforcement operation, [or] explicit mentions of their undercover status.”
Facebook's policy was revised in 2023; it had previously banned people from sharing explicit identifying information about undercover agents, not mentions of the agencies they work for.
Zuckerberg said earlier this year that content moderation on Facebook had "gone too far" and apologized to Republican lawmakers for previously stopping users from spreading misinformation about Covid-19.
"If the Facebook posts happen to bother Trump, will they still be uncensored, and will their 'free expression' be protected? If you understand what a Trump suck-up Zuckerberg is these days, you can probably take a wild guess," wrote Joe Kukura at SFist on Tuesday.
Zuckerberg was one of several tech billionaires who attended Trump's inauguration in January. Last month he and other Silicon Valley executives attended a White House dinner where they "lavished praise" on the president as they discussed their investments in artificial intelligence and their hopes for a "pro-business, pro-innovation" approach to the technology from the administration.
At the AV Club on Wednesday, Mary Kate Carr said the removal of the ICE Sighting group was "yet another installment of 'How are tech billionaires carrying water for Donald Trump today?'"
"This is the same company that had policies allowing for chatbots to have 'sensual' conversations with kids, but discussing local law enforcement among neighbors is a bridge too far, huh?" wrote Carr.
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Top Human Rights Group Makes Case for Countries to 'Break Up' Big Tech
Amnesty International says Big Tech's consolidation of power "has profound implications for human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, nondiscrimination, and access to information."
Aug 28, 2025
One of the world's leading human rights groups, Amnesty International, is calling on governments worldwide to "break up with Big Tech" by reining in the growing influence of tech and social media giants.
A report published Thursday by Amnesty highlights five tech companies: Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which Hannah Storey, an advocacy and policy adviser on technology and human rights at Amnesty, describes as "digital landlords who determine the shape and form of our online interaction."
These five companies collectively have billions of active users, which the report says makes them akin to "utility providers."
"This concentration of power," the report says, "has profound implications for human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, nondiscrimination, and access to information."
The report emphasizes the "pervasive surveillance" by Google and Meta, which profit from "harvesting and monetizing vast quantities of our personal data."
"The more data they collect, the more dominant they become, and the harder it is for competitors to challenge their position," the report says. "The result is a digital ecosystem where users have little meaningful choice or control over how their data is used."
Meanwhile, Google's YouTube, as well as Facebook and Instagram—two Meta products—function using algorithms "optimized for engagement and profit," which emphasize content meant to provoke strong emotions and outrage from users.
"In an increasingly polarized context, the report says, "this can contribute to the rapid spread of discriminatory speech and even incitement to violence, which has had devastating consequences in several crisis and conflict-affected areas."
The report notes several areas around the globe where social media algorithms amplified ethnic hatred. It cites past research showing how Facebook's algorithm helped to "supercharge" dehumanizing rhetoric that fueled the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the violence in Ethiopia's Tigray War.
More broadly, it says, the ubiquity of these tech companies in users' lives gives them outsized influence over access to information.
"Social media platforms shape what millions of people see online, often through opaque algorithms that prioritize engagement over accuracy or diversity," it says. "Documented cases of content removal, inconsistent moderation, and algorithmic bias highlight the dangers of allowing a handful of companies to act as gatekeepers of the digital public sphere."
Amnesty argues that international human rights law requires governments worldwide to intervene to protect their people from abuses by tech companies.
"States and competition authorities should use competition laws as part of their human rights toolbox," it says. "States should investigate and sanction anti-competitive behaviours that harm human rights, prevent regulatory capture, and prevent harmful monopolies from forming."
Amnesty also calls on these states to consider the possible human rights impacts of artificial intelligence, which it describes as the "next phase" of Big Tech's growing dominance, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google alone controlling 60% of the global cloud computing market.
"Addressing this dominance is critical, not only as a matter of market fairness but as a pressing human rights issue," Storey said. "Breaking up these tech oligarchies will help create an online environment that is fair and just."
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