Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is in the middle of a fight to maintain its social media monopoly-like status, and it’s not making many friends along the way. According to The Verge, the company got an earful in the form of lawyer-submitted smackdowns from fellow tech giants who were less than thrilled over the fact that Meta’s legal filings in its antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission were so poorly redacted that they revealed internal information from Snapchat, Google, and Apple.
The information revealed in the slides isn’t necessarily the most earth-shattering disclosures. As reported by The Verge, one slide showed data, seemingly from Apple, that shows the frequency of use of several different apps that have messaging features—including Apple’s Messages, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Snapchat—that suggested Messages dominated iOS when it comes to communications, not Meta’s offerings. Another slide, per The Verge, was titled “Snapchat in 2020: Competitors Are Succeeding and Not Just Meta Apps” and said apps other than Meta’s own are “thriving.”
But the fact that information made its way to public consumption was a pretty big “oops” on Meta’s part. The information was visible because of how the company redacted the documents, which it turned out was pretty easy to remove…which, of course, people did. That did not inspire confidence among the legal representation for companies, including Apple, Google, and Snapchat, that Meta was doing all it could to keep proprietary information protected. (Why they would want that information redacted is a different matter.)
According to The Verge, lawyers for Apple and Snap called the redaction mishap “egregious,” and Apple’s representation said the company may not be able to trust Meta with internal information going forward. Google’s lawyers also lambasted Meta for putting its business on front street. So obviously, the companies feeding Meta this information to help their case were not intending for it to leave the confines of Meta’s defense team.
This isn’t the first slip-up that has resulted in some stepped-on toes in Meta’s efforts to defend itself against antitrust charges brought by the FTC. Earlier in the trial, which is just a few days into the proceedings, Snap expressed frustration that Meta’s legal team revealed supposedly confidential information from Snap during its opening statements.
Meta’s sloppiness might stem from the fact that the company didn’t expect this trial to actually go forward. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicated that CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought his buddying up to President Trump would make the case go away for a small settlement. Instead, the company is fighting it out in court while pissing off its would-be allies along the way.
