Despite PR Pivot, Meta Is Still A Monopoly And A Threat To Society

Even Big Tech’s toughest conservative critics must admit Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have had a good few months.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s reelection last November, the $1 trillion company finally scrapped its worst woke initiatives, from Facebook’s infamous “fact-checking” regime to its internal DEI programming. Its sites are apparently no longer throttling political content. And Zuckerberg has even rebranded himself — going “all-in on a MAGA-dominated Washington,” buying a $23 million home two miles from the White House, and frequently rubbing shoulders with the president and his senior advisers.

With Meta’s very survival on the line in a landmark antitrust trial set to start next week, pundits from Washington to Wall Street to Silicon Valley are all wondering how much of an effect Zuckerberg’s political pivot will have on the case.

Let me suggest an answer: none.

Whether Meta’s MAGA turn this year is sincere or cynical is irrelevant. The fact is, Meta is an illegal monopoly. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 with anti-competitive intent, as Zuckerberg and his team’s own emails prove with smoking-gun definitiveness. The Federal Trade Commission has Zuckerberg and his firm dead to rights. They should proceed with the trial, win, and break up Meta, period.

The FTC’s case against Meta has nothing to do with partisan politics. The commission first investigated the company’s Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions under President Trump. This case was first brought in 2020 during the first Trump administration. And now it’s progressing to trial under Trump’s new chairman, Andrew Ferguson. That this bipartisan consensus has held firm despite Zuckerberg’s serpentine maneuvering — both the $400 million he contributed during the 2020 campaign to help elect Democrats and the $1 million he donated to President Trump’s inauguration fund — only reflects the strength of the evidence against him.

Evidence he himself produced.

In February 2012, two months before Facebook bought Instagram, Zuckerberg emailed his chief financial officer about the prospect of doing so:

One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram … now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.

This comment is so damning that 45 minutes later Zuckerberg sent another email trying to unsay what he had said — except he had said it before. Back in 2008, Zuckerberg put Facebook’s monopolistic vision even more succinctly in another internal email: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This has been Facebook’s market strategy for years: buy up “nascent” potential competitors before they pose a serious threat. “Instagram can hurt us,” Zuckerberg wrote in an email just before purchasing the company. “I personally think companies like WhatsApp are Facebook’s biggest threat,” another Facebook executive wrote before Zuckerberg bought that company too.

These emails are why this case has proceeded despite two partisan changes in the Oval Office. And why Meta has been so scrutinized by oversight committees under Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. They are also why Zuckerberg is personally lobbying President Trump to drop the case. He knows he’s guilty and that major antitrust cases have been lost — and huge corporations broken into pieces — over less dispositive evidence.

Strictly within the four corners of Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, then, politics is a distraction. But if political circumstances must be considered, they only bolster the FTC’s case at least as much as Zuckerberg’s Sent Items folder. The power that Meta and other Big Tech firms now wield is simply incompatible with a free society.

Just consider what Facebook has been able to do to manipulate the flow of information to hundreds of millions of Americans over the last decade.

Thanks to the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, we know that senior Meta executives altered Facebook’s content moderation policies under direct pressure from the Biden administration. Posts skeptical of DEI, Black Lives Matter, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Covid’s origins, and Anthony Fauci’s lockdowns were taken down, flagged as “misinformation,” or throttled by the website’s algorithm. Conservative publications were “downranked” so users wouldn’t see their articles. This wasn’t just a matter of a private business’s political bias. It was an official, unconstitutional censorship regime.

Whether Meta executed this censorship enthusiastically or grudgingly is, like Zuckerberg’s true political beliefs, irrelevant. The fact that Meta, all by itself, could exert such power over our national discourse threatens not only antitrust principles of consumer protection but also our entire constitutional order.

That whistleblowers accuse Meta of cooperating even more extensively with the Chinese Communist Party raises even more red flags. Exactly how many existential threats to self-government does one company have to pose before federal policymakers step in to protect the American people?

Conservatives are right to be skeptical of government intervention in the free market. But that’s precisely why Meta’s most vocal antitrust critics today are on the right. Meta isn’t an exemplar of our free market but its saboteur. Buying up companies with anticompetitive intent isn’t “the free market.” Conspiring with government to silence dissent is not “the free market.” Collaborating with genocidal, totalitarian enemies of the United States is not “the free market.” Neither, for that matter, is donating seven figures to a president-elect’s inauguration fund hoping it buys an antitrust “Get Out of Jail Free” card, like in that board game — what’s it called again?

No one wants to question the motives behind Zuckerberg’s recent shift to the right. Which is just as well, because no one has to. The FTC is not suing Meta for its past leftism or current MAGA-ism but for its longstanding, documented monopolism. 

Zuckerberg’s problem now — and the existential threat Meta now faces — is not that his company is being sued but that it is guilty, and his own words prove it. As Rooney Mara tells Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network, “The internet’s not written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.”

Rachel Bovard is the vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She served on Capitol Hill for over a decade, including as legislative director to Sen. Rand Paul and the executive director of the Senate Steering Committee.