Meta in the Hot Seat
TTP's April 11, 2025 Newsletter
Meta Whistleblower’s Explosive Testimony
On Wednesday, the Senate came together for a rare moment of bipartisanship to condemn Meta’s business practices. A hearing titled “Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress” featured testimony from Meta whistleblower and “Careless People” author Sarah Wynn-Williams, and focused largely on allegations she’s made about the company’s covert efforts to cozy up to China. Her appearance comes amidst a campaign by Meta to silence Wynn-Williams from speaking publicly – something that drew significant ire from both Republicans and Democrats at the hearing.
Although much of the discussion focused on Meta’s dealings with China, lawmakers also brought up Meta’s failure to protect kids. Wynn-Williams said that although the company recognized its young users as vulnerable, it also sees them as “very valuable” to their advertiser clientele. She said that Meta repeatedly targets emotionally vulnerable groups with its ads, and this includes teens.
At one point in the hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin referenced a section of Wynn-Williams’ book where she discussed how Meta executives at Facebook took efforts to protect their own children from social media and online exploitation. TTP director Katie Paul published an op-ed on this point in 2023—highlighting some of the lengths Silicon Valley executives will go to shield their children from big tech harms while they amass vast wealth at the peril of children in the US and globally.
Meta FTC Trial
Meta will be back in the spotlight next week when the Federal Trade Commission’s case against the company’s monopolistic practices goes to trial, starting on Monday morning. The agency first sued Meta (then Facebook) in 2020, alleging that the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp violated the law.
As the agency put it in their filing: “Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cozied up to the Trump Administration in a last-ditch effort to get the government to agree to a settlement rather than go to trial—but there’s no indication yet that those efforts have been successful.