Facebook Whistleblower: Breaking Meta’s Monopoly Would Improve Children’s Safety

In one of its first major actions under the Trump administration, the Federal Trade Commission is arguing Meta has an illegal monopoly in social media and should be forced to divest Instagram and WhatsApp. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Monday as the highly anticipated antitrust trial kicked off in Washington, D.C. If Meta loses the trial, it could be forced to sell off those platforms. “We’ve let one company, one man, influence the information environment for the world,” says Frances Haugen, former Facebook employee and whistleblower.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — what do all of these three widely used social media platforms have in common? They’re all owned by Meta.

This week, a highly anticipated antitrust trial kicked off in Washington, D.C., in which the Federal Trade Commission is arguing Meta has an illegal monopoly that should be forced to divest Instagram and WhatsApp. If Meta loses the trial, it could be forced to sell off those platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Monday and said, quote, “I think we misunderstood how social engagement online was evolving,” he said.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan spoke to CNN Monday about the case.

LINA KHAN: One interesting set of evidence that the FTC has is that Facebook has actually made its services worse for its users. And so, they note, for example, that Facebook has been significantly increasing the number of ads that it pushes to users, even though that makes the service worse. And that has not led it to suffer consequences in the marketplace, which itself is a marker of its monopoly power.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Frances Haugen, who is herself a former Facebook whistleblower, an advocate for social media transparency and accountability. Her memoir is titled The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook.

Frances Haugen, welcome to Democracy Now! This is extremely significant. You certainly started the ball rolling in an enormous way before you — when you testified before Congress. Talk about what’s at stake here and what you understood early on, even working at Facebook, that led you to be a whistleblower.

FRANCES HAUGEN: We have let a single company, controlled by single person — remember, Mark Zuckerberg holds the majority of voting shares for Facebook, so he’s really the only voice. We’ve let one company, one man, influence the information environment for the world.

I came forward as a whistleblower because I worked internally on issues around ethnic violence, manipulation of our political environment, information operations, foreign interference, and I saw how little — how unseriously Facebook took these issues, particularly in countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.

This case is so important because there are material differences between how different social media platforms treat issues and safety. TikTok, for all the things I’m critical of it, actually does a lot of things around children’s safety much better than Instagram. Same with things like Snapchat. Meta, because it is controlling these three critical platforms, so runs the internet for billions of people, doesn’t have to actually deal with having a competitor that might have more of an awareness of its responsibilities in the world and a commitment to safety.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Why — Frances Haugen, why should it have been illegal for Facebook to acquire Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014?

FRANCES HAUGEN: So, I think the question of — you know, the circumstances have changed so much. Like, I’m sympathetic to what happened when the FTC originally approved these deals. These were very, very small companies. They were bought not because of their size, but because of their velocity. And I think the FTC didn’t realize how much that mattered.

So, back in 2012, when Instagram was bought, you know, when we look at the FTC’s court documents they’ve already released, the thing that Mark Zuckerberg explicitly is saying to his other executives is, “We can see how big this is going to get.” They should have not approved it back then because of the dynamics of where the app was going, but they definitely need to break it up today, because it is the dominant form of social media for children or for — excuse me, for young adults under the age of, say, 25.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what was in those emails that Zuckerberg sent in 2008?

FRANCES HAUGEN: So, it’s wild. There’s a long series of — so, I encourage people — I know it’s going to sound dry. The federal government has released a huge number of documents in this case, and you can go see the exact words of Mark Zuckerberg talking about these companies. We’re talking about why Facebook wants to buy them. They say explicitly, “We know we’re behind. We know we have an inferior photos product. At a minimum, we’ll buy ourselves time. If we lock it up, we don’t have to worry about Google. We don’t have to worry about Apple. We don’t have to worry about someone who might go and make a competitor to Facebook coming along.” Those emails are more explicit, in many, many ways, than the antitrust suit against Google, which was lost last year. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out, because it’s so clear the intention here was to hurt consumers.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did Mark Zuckerberg know, and when did he know it, Frances Haugen? You’re famous for, in 2021, turning over tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to U.S. regulators and The Wall Street Journal, which became the basis of a damning series of reports called “The Facebook Papers.” Talk about what he said this week in this trial and what it would mean if it was broken apart.

FRANCES HAUGEN: You know, it’s fascinating. Mark borrowed a big page from — like Google did when they testified also last year, which was, even though he was shown document after document where, in his own words, he’s saying, “We need to buy Instagram to make the product not as good, to make sure we’re not threatened,” when asked, you know, “What does this mean? Why did you write this? Why these things?” he said, “Oh, I have no idea. I don’t remember.”

One of the explicit things the government is calling out and asking the courts to adjudicate is: Should the interpretations in the documents contemporaneous to when these decisions were made — because, remember, this is going on for months and months before Instagram was bought back, you know, over 10 years ago. In those emails, they’re very explicit about why they did these things. The fact that Mark can get on stage and say, “I don’t know why I did this. I don’t know why I did that,” waffling on what he thinks the implications are of these things, he said as little as he could, given that he had to sit on the stand for seven hours.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what would happen if Instagram and WhatsApp are separated from Meta? What would be your sense of the impact on Big Tech? Because Meta, of course, is not the only company. There are all these miracle seven tech companies that really are dominating the U.S. markets these days.

FRANCES HAUGEN: So, one of the things I think we should give the Trump administration credit for is that this case is still underway. You know, there’s many, many things where we’re seeing chaos in the federal government right now, but, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and all the Big Tech companies have been lobbying the Trump administration incredibly aggressively to drop their cases. You know, if we look at the inauguration, a huge swath of the biggest tech CEOs were sitting on the dais with Trump. You know, they were paying for the privilege of being able to say, “Oh, please, please, intervene.” And yet, the FTC continued with this case. And the head commissioner has said repeatedly, you know, “We’ve been working on this for five years. We’re not going to give up on it.”

And so, I think the thing that’ll be incredibly interesting to see play out over the next year is, Google lost the first step of their case. The thing that the courts are now trying to decide is: What is an appropriate remedy? Similarly, there’s cases out against Amazon. There’s cases out against Apple. We need to be having conversations about how much concentration of power we want to have in our economy and the implications of having just a few people being able to influence how we even interpret the world on such a fundamental level.

AMY GOODMAN: Frances Haugen, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Frances Haugen, former Facebook whistleblower, an advocate for social media transparency and accountability, her memoir is titled The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook. She was speaking to us from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

When we come back, we go to Harvard Law School to speak with professor Andrew Manuel Crespo, as Harvard pushes back against Trump’s attacks on higher education. Stay with us.