Long-standing tensions between Silicon Valley and the press that covers it have surfaced during the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Meta.
During the heated cross-examination of the FTC’s key economic expert, Scott Hemphill, Meta’s lead attorney, Mark Hansen, pointed out that Hemphill joined Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and former Biden official Tim Wu to present the company’s antitrust probe to regulators back in 2019. The presentation deck for the investigation, which was shown in court, included a “public admission” of the company’s aggressive acquisition strategy by the two reporters: Kara Swisher, who currently hosts two podcasts for The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, and Om Malik, the founder of the early tech blog GigaOm, who is now a venture capitalist.
In an effort to undermine Hemphill’s credibility, Hansen put Swisher and Malik in the crossfire. He called Malik a “loser blogger” who has a grudge against Matt. He then suggested that Swisher, whom he described as a Vanity Fair columnist (she last wrote for the site in 2015), was similarly biased against the company. In court, he projected a headline that she had recently called Mark Zuckerberg a “little creature with a shriveled soul.”
The 2019 pitch deck that Hansen showed in court also cited a Post article in support of Facebook being investigated as a monopoly. Meta’s Hansen asked whether Hemphill agreed that “The New York Post is a scandalous publication,” to which he replied that he “has no opinion on that.” Hansen showed the infamous headline on the front page of the Post, “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” to prove his point.
The exchange recalled the longstanding tensions between the press and the tech titans. After relatively positive coverage in the early, hopeful days of Silicon Valley, Facebook and a handful of startups have grown to become the largest platforms in the world. Along the way, they have suffered from increasingly critical coverage of their business.
Malik and Swisher were indeed critical of Meta and its executives. In 2016, Malik criticized Facebook’s intentions to provide free access to its and other apps in India after company board member Marc Andreessen accused local resistance to the program of “anti-colonialism” in a later deleted tweet. “I am suspicious of any for-profit company that claims to have good intentions and free gifts,” Malik wrote at the time.
Swisher is known for criticizing tech CEOs like Zuckerberg in public interviews. In 2018, Zuckerberg defended a Holocaust denial platform to her, and she called him “the most harmful person in technology.”
Tuesday’s exchange was not the first time that Meta has pointed the finger at the media during a trial. Discussing major scandals such as Cambridge Analytica from the witness stand, company executives attributed the drop in user sentiment to negative media attention and testified that Meta’s services have not experienced a similar decline in engagement.
The FTC argues that this fact is a sign of monopoly power, as people cannot leave Facebook and Instagram without viable alternatives. Whether this is true or not will ultimately be decided by a judge. In the meantime, Meta’s grudges against the press are on full display.
