Meta’s antitrust trial slide redactions aren’t actually hiding anything

A PDF of Meta’s opening connection slides successful its FTC antitrust hearing yesterday contains easy-to-remove redactions that marque it imaginable to spot everything the institution didn’t privation made public, The Verge has discovered. 

Thanks to the mediocre redactions, we tin spot sections comparing the usage of Apple’s Messages app to Meta apps similar Instagram and WhatsApp. The archetypal descent displayed lone a punctuation from Apple manager of merchandise selling Ronak Shah describing an iMessage “core usage case” allegedly akin to Facebook’s. Another, labeled “Snapchat successful 2020: Competitors Are Succeeding and Not Just Meta Apps,” says that “Tiktok, Insta, FB, Messengers and YouTube” are “thriving.”

Those aren’t particularly juicy details; astatine most, it looks similar idiosyncratic was conscionable being cautious — oregon trying to be, anyhow — with slides that came from different companies’ interior meetings. But the leak calls to caput mid-2023, erstwhile Sony spilled PlayStation secrets by utilizing sharpie to fell accusation — which fto the darker printed ink beneath beryllium disposable under, say, the agleam airy of a papers scanner — successful tribunal documents shared successful the Microsoft antitrust trial.