The government says Meta broke the law when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. The trial starts today. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner details the case. The Trump administration has purposely classified thousands of living immigrants as dead. Lisa Rein from the Washington Post explains why. Universities are coming off a pandemic that closed campuses and reduced enrollment numbers. These days, they’re contending with the Trump administration’s disruptive cuts to research. Bloomberg’s Elizabeth Rembert discusses what affected researchers have told her. Plus, Trump said tariffs are coming for smartphones and other electronics, Gaza’s last functioning hospital was attacked, and police made an arrest after a man allegedly set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
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Good morning. It's Monday, April 14th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, why the Social Security Administration is declaring some people dead falsely and on purpose. Higher ed institutions are doing disaster budgeting. And those tariff exemptions for smartphones and other electronics will be short-lived.
But first, social media giant Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is in court starting today in a massive antitrust trial that could change the entire social media landscape. The Federal Trade Commission alleges the company violated antitrust laws when it acquired Instagram in 2012 and the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
Lauren Feiner is a senior policy writer for The Verge, and she told us the government is arguing Meta with those acquisitions essentially became a monopoly.
Meta ended up growing its dominance and cutting off what could have been really formidable competitors to its dominance, and that it did that in order to retain this power in the market so that no one else could really come up against it.
The FTC cites a 2012 email in its argument where Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg names startups like Instagram as potentially disruptive to its business. Meta says the company always competes fairly and is facing punishment for its success in growing those apps into major players in the social media world.
Feiner says the crux of the FTC's argument is that Meta monopolizes personal social networking services, a definition that will matter a lot in this case. The way the FTC views it.
They basically say, look, there are this very tiny group of social networking apps that are really used just to connect with other people, to connect with friends and family. You use them differently than an app like YouTube or TikTok, where maybe you're primarily scrolling through and passively watching content.
And you're also using it differently than like a LinkedIn, where you're really trying to use it to find a job or make career connections. This is really about personal social networking.
Meta sees the space differently.
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