Reps. David N. Cicilline, D-R.I., and Ken Buck, R-Colo. are the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust.
Last week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, testified before the Senate about the thousands of internal documents she disclosed to The Wall Street Journal showing how Facebook’s algorithms foster discord.
As she testified, “Facebook repeatedly encountered conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved those conflicts in favor of its own profits.”
This latest evidence of Facebook’s moral failures is credible and damning, but these concerns are not new.
Instead, this evidence confirms what we have known about Facebook for years — that it will always prioritize growth and profit over everything else.
For example, nearly four years ago, Facebook’s former head of growth said that “we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works . . . No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.”
But this outcome is not inevitable — it is a policy choice.
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.
WhatsApp and Instagram would be different companies with different incentives had they not been acquired by Facebook.
Prior to being purchased, WhatsApp’s founders specifically rejected building the company around surveillance advertising and extracting users’ data. As they said in June 2012, “when advertising is involved you the user are the product.”
Similarly, before it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram focused on improving the quality of its platform rather than simply increasing virality at all costs.
As 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.”
Although 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.
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.
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 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 each instance, these changes were designed to spur addiction at the expense of user privacy, security, and safety.
As a result of Facebook’s…
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