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

A PDF of Meta’s opening statement slides in its FTC antitrust hearing yesterday contains easy-to-remove redactions that make it possible to see everything the company didn’t want made public, The Verge has discovered.

Thanks to the poor redactions, we can see sections comparing the use of Apple’s Messages app to Meta apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. The original slide displayed only a quote from Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah describing an iMessage “core use case” allegedly similar to Facebook’s. Another, labeled “Snapchat in 2020: Competitors Are Succeeding and Not Just Meta Apps,” says that “Tiktok, Insta, FB, Messengers and YouTube” are “thriving.”

Those aren’t especially juicy details; at most, it looks like someone was just being cautious — or trying to be, anyway — with slides that came from other companies’ internal meetings. But the leak calls to mind mid-2023, when Sony spilled PlayStation secrets by using sharpie to hide information — which let the darker printed ink below be visible under, say, the bright light of a document scanner — in court documents shared in the Microsoft antitrust trial.