Did You Know the Government Might Break Up Meta (Facebook)?
Actually, the media giant is in court for TWO lawsuits. But it's not front-page news.
I have for some time now been fascinated by systems. How they work. How they grow. How they deal with entropy.
Systems are often set up to support a budding idea or industry. Over time the steps and norms the system creates to solve certain problems become “just the way things are.” And we don’t often ask why.
Medicine, for instance. Why do we put residents through what amounts to an initiation rite by making them work 36-hour shifts? How can this possibly ensure patient safety? How can this possibly teach empathy? How is this practice not about power and hierarchy?
The law. Why is it that a man has to kill his ex-wife and five of her friends or family before he is taken off the streets, when he has shown violent and controlling tendencies since his teens? Why can we not bring evidence of patterns of domestic violence when a woman presses charges? Why is the entire system built on punishment rather than prevention?
And journalism.
There are many systemic issues that prevent journalism from being the ethical beacon I’ve always seen it as.
We can start with the adherence to the idea of “objectivity,” which, in practice, has simply acted as a shield to parry any suggestion of self-reflection.
“I’m not biased. I’m objective.”
Objectivity has gotten us to a place in which we center stories between the humanity of some people on one side and those who would deny that humanity on the other.
It reflects a power from the point of view of the storyteller, whose humanity is not being questioned.
Which is why journalism is so white. People who enter the profession from a lens of a group who are denied their humanity see “objectivity” differently than white men. But those people are often labeled as “biased,” and end up leaving the profession.
Over the years, I have been flabbergasted at how the systems of journalism themselves shape what news is told.
The criticism of the New York Times during the election, for example, was underpinned by the fact that election coverage is specifically given to the politics team, which has a specific system it deploys for every election.
The immigration reporters were not writing about the election - even though immigration was an important topic. When they did write about Trump or Biden or Harris, those stories were put in the immigration section, not on the front page; not under the politics coverage.
Which is why we get so much horserace reporting. The politics teams were literally set up just to do that. The issue reporters are usually not allowed to cross into the politics team’s turf during elections.
After Trump’s election, the stories that were suddenly showing up on the front pages of the major papers had depth and nuance and understanding of the consequences of Trump acting on all of his promises.
Those writers were not usually the same ones writing about the election.
This month, I have noted a slew of reporting about the antitrust trial that might break up Meta.
The issue is Meta’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012, followed by WhatsApp in 2014. The company spent $1 billion on the first transaction and $19 billion on the second.
The government is arguing that Zuckerberg was only interested in neutralizing his budding competition. They have emails and personal testimony to prove their case.
This, of course, is against the law.
To the extent that law is still a thing in Trump’s America.
Wait, what?
You’re forgiven if you don’t know there even is an antitrust trial to break up Meta.
You’re forgiven if you don’t know it’s been running through the courts for four years. And was under investigation two years prior to that.
You’re forgiven if you wonder why this wasn’t a huge issue when Facebook announced it was throttling political posts in 2024. Why weren’t people pointing out that there was a lawsuit Meta was trying to get thrown out that a future president might be able to toss?
You’re forgiven if you don’t remember any reporter noting during or right after the inauguration that Mark Zuckerberg had a stake in appeasing Trump.
You didn’t hear much about Zuckerberg visiting the White House a couple of weeks before the trial started.
Those things go together. The antitrust suit - brought by the FTC and 48 states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James - provides ample motive for Zuckerberg’s embrace of Trump.
But this month, as I have looked up all the stories on the trial - Zuckerberg testified for three days, then Sheryl Sandberg, then the creator of Instagram - I have noted that they are all filed in either the tech or business sections of various media outlets.
They are not on the front pages, or among the stories in the top-most layer of the newsfeeds of the legacy media. You have to click on business or tech, or search for “Facebook antitrust suit,” to get to them.
This is how the systems are set up. The most significant antitrust suit of the era is happening, but the people who write about it are considered niche, not front page reporters.
Look, I am an almost obsessive consumer of news. And I didn’t know about the antitrust suit until a couple of months ago.
Because I don’t read the business or tech sections.
This isn’t a decision by news media. It’s a non-decision. “It’s a tech story. It’s a business story.” We are so used to the systems we work and live in, it doesn’t even occur to people that perhaps there are other ways to evaluate stories, and decide what gets seen by readers and heard by audiences.
Here are some updates from various media (written by business or tech writers) during the last month:
Instagram Creator Kevin Systrom Tells the Court That IG was Underresourced After Zuckerberg’s Purchase
Zuckerberg Testifies He Liked the Camera, Hedges on Damaging Emails
Sandberg Defends Meta’s Investment in Instagram
Good overview from Euro News
Please share widely!
Oh, but there’s another lawsuit!
A hearing got started in San Francisco the other day that examines whether or not Meta stole copyrighted material in order to build it’s Llama AI model.
Two of the plaintiffs are writer Junot Diaz and comedian Sarah Silverman.
According to Reuters, the judge in the case, Vince Chhabria, was highly skeptical as to how Meta could argue that their use of Diaz and Silverman’s work was “fair use.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyer is David Boies. He represented Al Gore in the Bush v Gore fiasco in 2000. And he represented gay couples in California after Proposition 8 banned same sex marriage - leaving thousands of married couples in limbo - in 2008.
This case, being heard in San Francisco, will likely get more front-page press than the antitrust case, because celebrities are involved. But the stakes are high here. And I wonder how many news orgs will see beyond the famous people to articulate what this means for our lives.
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Carrie Kaufman is veteran print and radio journalist who has always been more interested in what people are avoiding than what they are talking about. She founded and published PerformInk, a Chicago theatre and film industry trade paper, which covered economics, jobs, politics, racism, sexism, power, real estate - all through the lens of the artist. She then moved on to public radio, where she hosted talk shows in Vegas and Wisconsin, which is when she realized she was too old to do bad journalism.
Check out past and present work on Muckrack.