Meta Antitrust Appeal: 29 States Back FTC as WhatsApp Privacy Lawsuit Intensifies Instagram Breakup Stakes
Publish Date: 2026-05-31 10:59:00
Source Domain: www.techtimes.com
Twenty-eight US states and the District of Columbia filed a joint amicus brief on Friday in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, throwing their collective legal weight behind the Federal Trade Commission’s appeal of a November 2025 ruling that cleared Meta Platforms of illegally monopolizing social media. The multistate filing, which arrived just eight days after Texas separately sued Meta alleging that WhatsApp’s core privacy promise is false, marked a convergence of legal pressures on the same two platforms — Instagram and WhatsApp — that together define the reach of Meta’s social media empire.
The timing is not coincidental. The antitrust appeal asks whether Meta can be forced to spin off platforms it acquired over a decade ago. The Texas encryption lawsuit asks whether those same platforms have been lying to 3.3 billion users about the most fundamental protection they offer. Both cases trace the same root question: what consequences follow from acquiring competitors and then running them in ways that harm the people who use them.
WhatsApp Privacy Promises, and What Texas Alleges Meta Actually Did
WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for approximately $19 billion. At the time, WhatsApp’s founders, including co-founder Jan Koum, publicly promised users that the acquisition would not change how the platform handled their data. In April 2016, Meta made WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption the platform’s default, implementing the Signal protocol — a move widely praised by privacy researchers as a genuine technical achievement. Messages encrypted with the Signal protocol can, in principle, only be read by the sender and recipient; no one else, including WhatsApp or Meta, can access them.
Within months of that rollout, however, Meta began reversing the data-privacy commitments that had been part of WhatsApp’s original appeal. In August 2016, WhatsApp updated its terms to allow user data — including phone numbers and usage metadata — to be shared with…
