Snap Detailed Facebook's Aggressive Tactics in 'Project Voldemort' Dossier

Facebook for most of the past decade was Silicon Valley's 800-pound gorilla, squashing rivals, ripping off their best ideas or buying them outright as it cemented its dominance of social media. Now the knives are coming out [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: A number of Facebook's current and former competitors are talking about the company's hardball tactics to investigators from the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its broader antitrust investigation into the social-media giant's business practices, according to people familiar with the matter. One of them is Snap, where the legal team for years kept a dossier of ways that the company felt Facebook was trying to thwart competition from the buzzy upstart, according to people familiar with the matter. The title of the documents: Project Voldemort.

The files in Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children's books, chronicled Facebook's moves that threatened to undermine Snap's business, including discouraging popular account holders, or influencers, from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts, according to people familiar with the project. Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content from trending on its app, the people said.

Voldemort is also a Facebook FOSS datastore

[mangastudent]

I always thought it was a bad naming choice. [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[110010001000]

I thought LinkedIn used that and Facebook used something else.

fictional antagonist

[TeknoHog]

Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children's books

As opposed to the real antagonists in Harry Potter books.

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[LoadLin]

"The real antagonists"
Bad critics...

Re:

[tinkerton]

Well according to Cornelius Fudge a resurrected Voldemort was a fictional antagonist until proven otherwise.

this seems like normal business.

[shadowrat]

Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content from trending on its app

Facebook controlling it's own properties? is there some constitutional amendment that i missed guaranteeing equal instagram trending for all? this all seems kind of like normal business to me.

I used to [10 - 15 years ago] do work for Miller Brewing. The battle between the big brewers was fierce. You can bet that Bob Uecker (or any other paid miller spokesperson) was forbidden from ever being seen with a bud, or any other beer. Distributors had to pick one side or the other. We did have filters on any comment sections of websites to prevent budweiser from coming up.

heck, it was even made very clear to me, just an engineer on some promotional apps, that i should never order any budweiser products in public. the miller execs had met me, and people knew who i was. our contract hung in jeopardy if i were to be seen with the competitor's product.

now , if facebook was paying google money to suppress snap. that sounds questionable.

Re:this seems like normal business.

[Sebby]

I wonder what "including discouraging popular account holders, or influencers, from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts" meant.... maybe some sort of retaliation threats? That would certainly be questionable as an anti-competitive practice to regulators.

Re:

[Minupla]

No constitutional amendment, however antitrust law applies in situations where a company is utilizing their monopoly in one area to suppress competition in another area. See Microsoft and browsers for the canonical example. This is also why you don't see google dropping any page that mentions DuckDuckGo from its index.

In your personal case of Miller, I don't think the FTC considers them a monopoly, since you had a viable competitor, and the forums you were suppressing them from didn't constitute a monopol

Organic growth of ideas, what happened?

[spire3661]

I suppose we were all very foolish in thinking that the internet would bring an era of enlightenment, where the best ideas and speakers would rise from the commons. Nope, its money all the way down.

Snap[e]Chat?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Technically it was Nagini that did the killing, though.

Counterpoint: Or was it the Imperious curse?

Actually, if Zuck's soul has been split seven times, that would explain quite a bit.

ghost of Thurman Arnold

[astrofurter]

Rumor has it the ghost of Thurman Arnold has once again been sighted in Palo Alto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]