The TikTok ban is back in court — in Meta’s antitrust trial
1 min read
Summary
TikTok’s head of operations and trust and safety Adam Presser testified in Washington DC’s Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Meta, in the same courthouse where a panel of judges ruled that the US could expel TikTok.
Presser’s role was to explain how TikTok competes, or doesn’t, with Meta’s services in a market defined by the FTC as personal social networking, which contains only Meta’s services, Snapchat and MeWe.
Lawyers for both FTC and Meta referred to filings TikTok made in its own litigation against the 2024 divest-or-ban law, which required Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its US business.
The FTC argued that TikTok’s unique services couldn’t be easily replaced in the US, with many creators arguing that they would lose their businesses if the app were to disappear.
TikTok has argued that a divestment would take years to replicate the systems which keep the current app running, and a potential ban would cause irreversible harm to the business.
Meta argued that it provided Instagram with resources that made it safer and more reliable, but the FTC claims the platform would have been able to solve these issues alone.