A major antitrust trial against Meta began today in a Washington, D.C. courtroom. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) argues that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, became a monopoly after it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta counters that there’s no evidence they’re a monopoly, and that acquisition of those two apps was approved by the federal government more than a decade ago.
The case will test how much the FTC under President Donald Trump will challenge Big Tech. Though they’ve long been a target of Republicans, Big Tech and Silicon Valley writ large have grown increasingly closer to the Trump administration since his election. For instance, the leaders of Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple each donated one million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund. Meta loosened content moderation and fact-checking policies that right-wing figures said censored their voices.
But Silicon Valley’s apparent right-wing shift should not surprise us, says Dr. Becca Lewis of Stanford University. KCSB’s Rebecca Le Jeune talked to Lewis to find out why.
