🧭 FTC files amended antitrust complaint against Facebook

Well that didn’t take long. 

A few weeks after a federal judge dismissed the FTC’s hyped Facebook lawsuit, the FTC filed its modified attempt to prove Facebook has violated antitrust laws. 

• The original complaint failed for one major reason: It wasn’t thorough enough. The court said the FTC hadn’t provided sufficient evidence that Facebook was a monopoly, particularly concerning developments over the past couple of years. 

• This time the FTC explained social networks in greater depth:According to the Verge, the amended complaint described Facebook as a dominant provider of a social space, separating it from companies like Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. 

Was anything else new?

The argument was roughly the same: That Facebook’s widespread power in social media is bad for consumers. The FTC basically just gave more examples, another being the way it recovered from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “Facebook’s ability to harm users by decreasing product quality without losing significant user engagement,” the complaint reads, according to The Verge, “indicates that Facebook has market power.  

The Verdict

Facebook can take until early October to craft a response. It will likely be a few more months after that before the judge hears the case again.