When X CEO Linda Yaccarino took the stage as a keynote speaker at CES 2025, she revealed that “90 percent of the advertisers” who boycotted X over brand safety concerns since Elon Musk’s 2022 Twitter acquisition “are back on X.”
Yaccarino did not go into any further detail to back up the data point, and X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.
But Yaccarino’s statistic seemed to bolster claims that X had made since Donald Trump’s re-election that advertisers were flocking back to the platform, with some outlets reporting that brands hoped to win Musk’s favor in light of his perceived influence over Trump by increasing spending on X.
However, it remains hard to gauge how impactful this seemingly significant number of advertisers returning will be in terms of spiking X’s value, which fell by as much as 72 percent after Musk’s Twitter takeover. And X’s internal data doesn’t seem to completely sync up with data from marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower, suggesting that more context may be needed to understand if X’s financial woes may potentially be easing up in 2025.
Before the presidential election, Sensor Tower previously told Ars that “72 out of the top 100 spending US advertisers” on Twitter/X from October 2022 had “ceased spending on the platform as of September 2024.” This was up from 50 advertisers who had stopped spending on Twitter/X in October 2023, about a year after Musk’s acquisition, suggesting that the boycott had seemingly only gotten worse.
Shortly after the election, AdWeek reported that big brands, including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment, had resumed advertising on X. But by the end of 2024, Sensor Tower told Ars that X still had seemingly not succeeded in wooing back many of pre-acquisition Twitter’s top spenders, making Yaccarino’s claim that “90 percent of advertisers are back on X” somewhat harder to understand.
One of the fastest monopoly trials on record wound down Monday, as US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema heard closing arguments on Google’s alleged monopoly in a case over the company’s ad tech.
Department of Justice lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum kicked things off by telling Brinkema that Google “rigged” ad auctions, allegedly controlling “multiple parts” of services used to place ads all over the Internet, unfairly advantaging itself in three markets, The New York Times reported.
“Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist,” Teitelbaum said, while reinforcing that “these are the markets that make the free and open Internet possible.”
Teitelbaum likened Google to a “predator,” preying on publishers that allegedly had no viable other options for ad revenue but to stick with Google’s products. An executive for News Corp. testified that the news organization felt it was being held “hostage” because it risked losing $9 million in 2017 if it walked away from Google’s advertising platform.
Brinkema, who wasted no time and frequently urged lawyers to avoid repeating themselves or dragging out litigation with unnecessary testimony throughout the trial, reportedly pushed back.
In one instance she asked, “What would happen if a company had produced the best product,” but Teitelbaum rejected the idea that Google’s ad tech platform had competed on the merits.
“The problem is Google hasn’t done that,” Teitelbaum said, alleging that instead better emerging products “died out,” unable to compete on the merits.
According to Vidushi Dyall, the director of legal analysis for the Chamber of Progress (a trade group representing Google), this lack of advertiser testimony or evidence of better products could be key flaws in the DOJ’s argument. When Brinkema asked what better products Google had stamped out, the DOJ came up blank, Dyall posted in a thread on X (formerly Twitter).
Further, Dyall wrote, Brinkema “noted that the DOJ’s case was notably absent of direct testimony from advertisers.” The judge apparently criticized the DOJ for focusing too much on how publishers were harmed while providing “no direct evidence about advertisers and how satisfied/dissatisfied they are with the system,” Dyall wrote.
Google wound down its defense in the US Department of Justice’s ad tech monopoly trial this week, following a week of testimony from witnesses that experts said seemed to lack credibility.
The tech giant started its defense by showing a widely mocked chart that Google executive Scott Sheffer called a “spaghetti football,” supposedly showing a fluid industry thriving thanks to Google’s ad tech platform but mostly just “confusing” everyone and possibly even helping to debunk its case, Open Markets Institute policy analyst Karina Montoya reported.
“The effect of this image might have backfired as it also made it evident that Google is ubiquitous in digital advertising,” Montoya reported. “During DOJ’s cross-examination, the spaghetti football was untangled to show only the ad tech products used specifically by publishers and advertisers on the open web.”
One witness, Marco Hardie, Google’s current head of industry, was even removed from the stand, his testimony deemed irrelevant by US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, Big Tech On Trial reported. Another, Google executive Scott Sheffer, gave testimony Brinkema considered “tainted,” Montoya reported. But perhaps the most heated exchange about a witness’ credibility came during the DOJ’s cross-examination of Mark Israel, the key expert that Google is relying on to challenge the DOJ’s market definition.
Google’s case depends largely on Brinkema agreeing that the DOJ’s market definition is too narrow, with an allegedly outdated focus on display ads on the open web, as opposed to a broader market including display ads appearing in apps or on social media. But experts monitoring the trial suggested that Brinkema may end up questioning Israel’s credibility after DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum’s aggressive cross-examination.
According to Big Tech on Trial, which posted the exchange on X (formerly Twitter), Teitelbaum’s line of questioning came across as a “striking and effective impeachment of Mark Israel’s credibility as a witness.”
During his testimony, Israel told Brinkema that Google’s share of the US display ads market is only 25 percent, minimizing Google’s alleged dominance while emphasizing that Google faced “intense competition” from other Big Tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and TikTok in this broader market, Open Markets Institute policy analyst Karina Montoya reported.
On cross-examination, Teitelbaum called Israel out as a “serial ‘expert’ for companies facing antitrust challenges” who “always finds that the companies ‘explained away’ market definition,” Big Tech on Trial posted on X. Teitelbaum even read out quotes from past cases “in which judges described” Israel’s “expert testimony as ‘not credible’ and having ‘misunderstood antitrust law.'”
Israel was also accused by past judges of rendering his opinions “based on false assumptions,” according to USvGoogleAds, a site run by the digital advertising watchdog Check My Ads with ad industry partners. And specifically for the Google ad tech case, Teitelbaum noted that Israel omitted ad spend data to seemingly manipulate one of his charts.
“Not a good look,” the watchdog’s site opined.
Perhaps most damaging, Teitelbaum asked Israel to confirm that “80 percent of his income comes from doing this sort of expert testimony,” suggesting that Israel seemingly depended on being paid by companies like Jet Blue and Kroger-Albertsons—and even previously by Google during the search monopoly trial—to muddy the waters on market definition. Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer with the American Economic Liberties Project, posted on X that the DOJ’s antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, has grown wary of serial experts supposedly sowing distrust in the court system.
“Let me say this clearly—this will not end well,” Kanter said during a speech at a competition law conference this month. “Already we see a seeping distrust of expertise by the courts and by law enforcers.”
“Best witnesses money can buy”
In addition to experts and Google staffers backing up Google’s proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, Google brought in Courtney Caldwell—the CEO of a small business that once received a grant from Google and appears in Google’s marketing materials—to back up claims that a DOJ win could harm small businesses, Big Tech on Trial reported.
Google’s direct examination of Caldwell was “basically just a Google ad,” Big Tech on Trial said, while Check My Ads’ site suggested that Google mostly just called upon “the best witnesses their money can buy, and it still did not get them very far.”
According to Big Tech on Trial, Google is using a “light touch” in its defense, refusing to go “pound for pound” to refute the DOJ’s case. Using this approach, Google can seemingly ignore any argument the DOJ raises that doesn’t fit into the picture Google wants Brinkema to accept of Google’s ad empire growing organically, rather than anti-competitively constructed with the intent to shut out rivals through mergers and acquisitions.
Where the DOJ wants the judge to see “a Google-only pipeline through the heart of the ad tech stack, denying non-Google rivals the same access,” Google argues that it has only “designed a set of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base.”
Evidence that Brinkeman might find hard to ignore include a 2008 statement from Google’s former president of display advertising, David Rosenblatt, confirming that it would “take an act of god” to get people to switch ad platforms because of extremely high switching costs. Rosenblatt also suggested in a 2009 presentation that Google acquiring DoubleClick for Publishers would make Google’s ad tech like the New York Stock Exchange, putting Google in a position to monitor every ad sale and doing for display ads “what Google did to search.” There’s also a 2010 email where now-YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recommended getting Google ahead in the display ad market by “parking” a rival with “the most traction.”
On Friday, testimony concluded abruptly after the DOJ only called one rebuttal witness, Big Tech on Trial posted on X. Brinkema is expected to hear closing arguments on November 25, Big Tech on Trial reported, and rule in December, Montoya reported.
Enlarge/ A staffer with the Paul, Weiss legal firm wheels boxes of legal documents into the Albert V. Bryan US Courthouse at the start of a Department of Justice antitrust trial against Google over its advertiing business in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 9, 2024. Google faces its second major antitrust trial in less than a year, with the US government accusing the tech giant of dominating online advertising and stifling competition.
Just a couple of days into the Google ad tech antitrust trial, it seems clear that the heart of the US Department of Justice’s case is proving that Google Ad Manager is the key to the tech giant’s alleged monopoly.
Google Ad Manager is the buy-and-sell side ad tech platform launched following Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and AdX in 2008 for $3 billion. It is currently used to connect Google’s publisher ad servers with its ad exchanges, tying the two together in a way that allegedly locks the majority of publishers into paying higher fees on the publisher side because they can’t afford to drop Google’s ad exchange.
The DOJ has argued that Google Ad Manager “serves 90 percent of publishers that use the ad tech tools to sell their online ad inventory,” AdAge reported, and through it, Google clearly wields monopoly powers.
In her opening statement, DOJ attorney Julia Tarver Wood argued that acquisitions helped Google manipulate the rules of ad auctions to maximize profits while making it harder for rivals to enter and compete in the markets Google allegedly monopolized. The DOJ has argued those alleged monopolies are in markets “for publisher ad servers, advertiser ad networks, and the ad exchanges that connect the two,” Reuters reported.
Google has denied this characterization of its ad tech dominance, calling the DOJ’s market definitions too narrow. The tech company also pointed out that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated and unconditionally approved the DoubleClick merger in 2007, amidst what the FTC described as urgent “high profile public discussions of the competitive merits of the transaction, in which numerous (sometimes conflicting) theories of competitive harm were proposed.” At that time, the FTC concluded that the acquisition “was unlikely to reduce competition in any relevant antitrust market.”
But in its complaint, the DOJ argued that the DoubleClick “acquisition vaulted Google into a commanding position over the tools publishers use to sell advertising opportunities, complementing Google’s existing tool for advertisers, Google Ads, and set the stage for Google’s later exclusionary conduct across the ad tech industry.”
To set things right, at the very least, the DOJ has asked the court to order Google to spin off Google Ad Manager, which may or may not include valuable products like Google’s Display and Video 360 (DV360) platform. There is also the possibility that the US district judge, Leonie Brinkema, could order Google to sell off its ad tech business entirely.
One problem with those proposed remedies, analysts told AdAge, is that no one knows how big Google’s ad tech business really is or the actual value of Google Ad Manager.
Google Ad Manager could be worth less if Google’s DV360 platform isn’t included in the sale or if selling either the publisher or advertiser side cuts out data allowing Google to set the prices that it wants. The CEO of an ad platform called Permutive, Joe Root, told AdAge that “it is hard to say how much of the value of Google’s ads business is because it has this advertiser product and DV360, versus how much of its value comes from Google Ad Manager alone.”
Root doubts that Google Ad Manager is “on its own that valuable.” However, based on “newly released documents for the trial,” some analysts predict that “any new entity spun out of Google” would be “almost too big for any buyer,” AdAge reported.
One estimate from an ad tech consultant who helms a strategic advisory firm called Luma Partners, Terence Kawaja, suggested that Google’s ad tech business as a standalone company “could be worth up to $95 billion” today, AdAge reported.
“You can’t divest $100 billion,” Kawaja said. “There is no buyer for it. [Google] would have to spin it off to shareholders, that’s how any forced remedy would manifest.”
Enlarge/ Karen Dunn, one of the lawyers representing Google, outside of the Albert V. Bryan US Courthouse at the start of a Department of Justice antitrust trial against Google over its advertiing business in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 9, 2024.
“One monopoly is bad enough,” Wood said. “But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
In its complaint, the DOJ argued that Google broke competition in the ad tech space “by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”
The result of such “insidious” allegedly anti-competitive behavior is that today Google pockets at least 30 cents “of each advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through Google’s ad tech tools … and sometimes far more,” the DOJ alleged.
Meanwhile, as Google profits off both advertisers and publishers, “website creators earn less, and advertisers pay more” than “they would in a market where unfettered competitive pressure could discipline prices and lead to more innovative ad tech tools,” the DOJ alleged.
On Monday, Wood told Brinkema that Google intentionally put itself in this position to “manipulate the rules of ad auctions to its own benefit,” The Washington Post reported.
“Publishers were understandably furious,” Wood said. “The evidence will show that they could do nothing.”
Wood confirmed that the DOJ planned to call several publishers as witnesses in the coming weeks to explain the harms caused. Expected to take the stand will be “executives from companies including USA Today, [Wall Street] Journal parent company News Corp., and the Daily Mail,” the Post reported.
The ad tech trial, which is expected to last four to six weeks, may be the most consequential of the monopoly trials Google has recently faced, experts have said.
That’s because during the DOJ’s trial proving Google’s monopoly in search, it remained unclear what remedies the DOJ sought. Some ways to destroy Google’s search monopoly could be “unlikely to create meaningful competition” or hurt Google’s bottom line, experts told Ars, but a more drastic order to spin out its Chrome browser or Android operating system could really impact Google’s revenue. It won’t be until December that the DOJ will even provide a rough outline of proposed remedies in that case, Reuters reported, with the judge not expected to rule until next August.
But the DOJ has been very clear about the remedies needed in the ad tech case, “asking Brinkema to order a divestment of Google’s Ad Manager suite of services, which is responsible for many of the rectangular ads that populate the tops and sides of webpages across the Internet,” the Post reported.
Because the most “obvious” remedy would be to require Google to sell off parts of its ad business, experts told AP News that the ad tech trial “could potentially be more harmful to Google” than the search trial. Perhaps at the furthest extreme, antitrust expert Shubha Ghosh told Ars that “if this case goes against Google as the last one did, it could set the stage for splitting it into separate search and advertising companies.”
In the DOJ’s complaint, prosecutors argued that it “is critical to restore competition in these markets by enjoining Google’s anticompetitive practices, unwinding Google’s anticompetitive acquisitions, and imposing a remedy sufficient both to deny Google the fruits of its illegal conduct and to prevent further harm to competition in the future.”
Ghosh said that undoing Google’s acquisitions could lead to Google no longer representing both advertisers’ and sellers’ interests in each ad auction—instead requiring Google to either pick a side or perhaps involve a broker.
Although the Post reported that Google has argued that “customers prefer the convenience of a one-stop shop,” the DOJ hopes to prove that Google’s alleged monopoly has shuttered newspapers across the US and threatens to do more harm if left unchecked.
Google announced Monday that it’s shutting down all AdSense accounts in Russia due to “ongoing developments in Russia.”
This effectively ends Russian content creators’ ability to monetize their posts, including YouTube videos. The change impacts accounts monetizing content through AdSense, AdMob, and Ad Manager, the support page said.
While Google has declined requests to provide details on what prompted the change, it’s the latest escalation of Google’s ongoing battle with Russian officials working to control the narrative on Russia’s war with Ukraine.
In February 2022, Google paused monetization of all state-funded media in Russia, then temporarily paused all ads in the country the very next month. That March, Google paused the creation of new Russia-based AdSense accounts and blocked ads globally that originated from Russia. In March 2022, Google also paused monetization of any content exploiting, condoning, or dismissing Russia’s war with Ukraine. Seemingly as retaliation, Russia seized Google’s bank account, causing Google Russia to shut down in May 2022.
Since then, Google has “blocked more than 1,000 YouTube channels, including state-sponsored news, and over 5.5 million videos,” Reuters reported.
For Russian creators who have still found ways to monetize their content amid the chaos, Google’s decision to abruptly shut down AdSense accounts comes as “a serious blow to their income,” Bleeping Computer reported. Russia is second only to the US in terms of YouTube web traffic, Similarweb data shows, making it likely that Russia-based YouTubers earned “significant” revenues that will now be suddenly lost, Bleeping Computer reported.
Russia-based creators—including YouTubers, as well as bloggers and website owners—will receive their final payout this month, according to a message from Google to users reviewed by Reuters.
“Assuming you have no active payment holds and meet the minimum payment thresholds,” payments will be disbursed between August 21 and 26, Google’s message said.
Google’s spokesperson offered little clarification to Reuters and Bleeping Computer, saying only that “we will no longer be able to make payments to Russia-based AdSense accounts that have been able to continue monetizing traffic outside of Russia. As a result, we will be deactivating these accounts effective August 2024.”
It seems likely, though, that Russia passing a law in March—banning advertising on websites, blogs, social networks, or any other online sources published by a “foreign agent,” as Reuters reported in February—perhaps influenced Google’s update. The law also prohibited foreign agents from placing ads on sites, and under the law, foreign agents could include anti-Kremlin politicians, activists, and media. With new authority, Russia may have further retaliated against Google, potentially forcing Google to give up the last bit of monetization available to Russia-based creators increasingly censored online.
State assembly member and Putin ally Vyacheslav Volodin said that the law was needed to stop financing “scoundrels” allegedly “killing our soldiers, officers, and civilians,” Reuters reported.
One Russian YouTuber with 11.4 million subscribers, Valentin Petukhov, suggested on Telegram that Google shut down AdSense because people had managed to “bypass payment blocks imposed by Western sanctions on Russian banks,” Bleeping Computer reported.
According to Petukhov, the wording in Google’s message to users was “kind of strange,” making it unclear what account holders should do next.
“Even though the income from monetization has fallen tenfold, it hasn’t disappeared completely,” Petukhov said.
YouTube still spotty in Russia
Google’s decision to end AdSense in Russia follows reports of a mass YouTube outage that Russian Internet monitoring service Sboi.rf reported is still impacting users today.
Officials in Russia claim that YouTube has been operating at slower speeds because Google stopped updating its equipment in the region after the invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reported.
This outage and the slower speeds led “subscribers of over 135 regional communication operators in Russia” to terminate “agreements with companies due to problems with the operation of YouTube and other Google services,” the Russian tech blog Habr reported.
As Google has tried to resist pressure from Russian lawmakers to censor content that officials deem illegal, such as content supporting Ukraine or condemning Russia, YouTube had become one of the last bastions of online free speech, Reuters reported. It’s unclear how ending monetization in the region will impact access to anti-Kremlin reporting on YouTube or more broadly online in Russia. Last February, a popular journalist with 1.64 million subscribers on YouTube, Katerina Gordeeva, wrote on Telegram that “she was suspending her work due to the law,” Reuters reported.
“We will no longer be able to work as before,” Gordeeva said. “Of course, we will look for a way out.”
Elon Musk’s fight against Media Matters for America (MMFA)—a watchdog organization that he largely blames for an ad boycott that tanked Twitter/X’s revenue—has raised an interesting question about whether any judge owning Tesla stock might reasonably be considered biased when weighing any lawsuit centered on the tech billionaire.
In a court filing Monday, MMFA lawyers argued that “undisputed facts—including statements from Musk and Tesla—lay bare the interest Tesla shareholders have in this case.” According to the watchdog, any outcome in the litigation will likely impact Tesla’s finances, and that’s a problem because there’s a possibility that the judge in the case, Reed O’Connor, owns Tesla stock.
“X cannot dispute the public association between Musk—his persona, business practices, and public remarks—and the Tesla brand,” MMFA argued. “That association would lead a reasonable observer to ‘harbor doubts’ about whether a judge with a financial interest in Musk could impartially adjudicate this case.”
It’s still unclear if Judge O’Connor actually owns Tesla stock. But after MMFA’s legal team uncovered disclosures showing that he did as of last year, they argued that fact can only be clarified if the court views Tesla as a party with a “financial interest in the outcome of the case” under Texas law—“no matter how small.”
To make those facts clear, MMFA is now arguing that X must be ordered to add Tesla as an interested person in the litigation, which a source familiar with the matter told Ars, would most likely lead to a recusal if O’Connor indeed still owned Tesla stock.
“At most, requiring X to disclose Tesla would suggest that judges owning stock in Tesla—the only publicly traded Musk entity—should recuse from future cases in which Musk himself is demonstrably central to the dispute,” MMFA argued.
Ars could not immediately reach X Corp’s lawyer for comment.
However, in X’s court filing opposing the motion to add Tesla as an interested person, X insisted that “Tesla is not a party to this case and has no interest in the subject matter of the litigation, as the business relationships at issue concern only X Corp.’s contracts with X’s advertisers.”
Calling MMFA’s motion “meritless,” X accused MMFA of strategizing to get Judge O’Connor disqualified in order to go “forum shopping” after MMFA received “adverse rulings” on motions to stay discovery and dismiss the case.
As to the question of whether any judge owning Tesla stock might be considered impartial in weighing Musk-centric cases, X argued that Judge O’Connor was just as duty-bound to reject an improper motion for recusal, should MMFA go that route, as he was to accept a proper motion.
“Courts are ‘reluctant to fashion a rule requiring judges to recuse themselves from all cases that might remotely affect nonparty companies in which they own stock,'” X argued.
Recently, judges have recused themselves from cases involving Musk without explaining why. In November, a prior judge in the very same Media Matters’ suit mysteriously recused himself, with The Hill reporting that it was likely that the judge’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” for reasons like a financial interest or personal bias. Then in June, another judge ruled he was disqualified to rule on a severance lawsuit raised by former Twitter executives without giving “a specific reason,” Bloomberg Law reported.
Should another recusal come in the MMFA lawsuit, it would be a rare example of a judge clearly disclosing a financial interest in a Musk case.
“The straightforward question is whether Musk’s statements and behavior relevant to this case affect Tesla’s stock price, not whether they are the only factor that affects it,” MMFA argued. ” At the very least, there is a serious question about whether Musk’s highly unusual management practices mean Tesla must be disclosed as an interested party.”
Parties expect a ruling on MMFA’s motion in the coming weeks.
Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called “Ghostbusters,” designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.
The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.
“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them,” Zuckerberg continued. “Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”
At the time, Olivan was Facebook’s head of growth, but now he’s Meta’s chief operating officer. He responded to Zuckerberg’s email saying that he would have the team from Onavo—a controversial traffic-analysis app acquired by Facebook in 2013—look into it.
Olivan told the Onavo team that he needed “out of the box thinking” to satisfy Zuckerberg’s request. He “suggested potentially paying users to ‘let us install a really heavy piece of software'” to intercept users’ Snapchat data, a court document shows.
What the Onavo team eventually came up with was a project internally known as “Ghostbusters,” an obvious reference to Snapchat’s logo featuring a white ghost. Later, as the project grew to include other Facebook rivals, including YouTube and Amazon, the project was called the “In-App Action Panel” (IAAP).
The IAAP program’s purpose was to gather granular insights into users’ engagement with rival apps to help Facebook develop products as needed to stay ahead of competitors. For example, two months after Zuckerberg’s 2016 email, Meta launched Stories, a Snapchat copycat feature, on Instagram, which the Motley Fool noted rapidly became a key ad revenue source for Meta.
In an email to Olivan, the Onavo team described the “technical solution” devised to help Zuckerberg figure out how to get reliable analytics about Snapchat users. It worked by “develop[ing] ‘kits’ that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” the Onavo team said.
Olivan was told that these so-called “kits” used a “man-in-the-middle” attack typically employed by hackers to secretly intercept data passed between two parties. Users were recruited by third parties who distributed the kits “under their own branding” so that they wouldn’t connect the kits to Onavo unless they used a specialized tool like Wireshark to analyze the kits. TechCrunch reported in 2019 that sometimes teens were paid to install these kits. After that report, Facebook promptly shut down the project.
This “man-in-the-middle” tactic, consumers and advertisers suing Meta have alleged, “was not merely anticompetitive, but criminal,” seemingly violating the Wiretap Act. It was used to snoop on Snapchat starting in 2016, on YouTube from 2017 to 2018, and on Amazon in 2018, relying on creating “fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis.”
Ars could not reach Snapchat, Google, or Amazon for comment.
Facebook allegedly sought to confuse advertisers
Not everyone at Facebook supported the IAAP program. “The company’s highest-level engineering executives thought the IAAP Program was a legal, technical, and security nightmare,” another court document said.
Pedro Canahuati, then-head of security engineering, warned that incentivizing users to install the kits did not necessarily mean that users understood what they were consenting to.
“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay,” Canahuati said. “No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works.”
Mike Schroepfer, then-chief technology officer, argued that Facebook wouldn’t want rivals to employ a similar program analyzing their encrypted user data.
“If we ever found out that someone had figured out a way to break encryption on [WhatsApp] we would be really upset,” Schroepfer said.
While the unsealed emails detailing the project have recently raised eyebrows, Meta’s spokesperson told Ars that “there is nothing new here—this issue was reported on years ago. The plaintiffs’ claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.”
According to Business Insider, advertisers suing said that Meta never disclosed its use of Onavo “kits” to “intercept rivals’ analytics traffic.” This is seemingly relevant to their case alleging anticompetitive behavior in the social media ads market, because Facebook’s conduct, allegedly breaking wiretapping laws, afforded Facebook an opportunity to raise its ad rates “beyond what it could have charged in a competitive market.”
Since the documents were unsealed, Meta has responded with a court filing that said: “Snapchat’s own witness on advertising confirmed that Snap cannot ‘identify a single ad sale that [it] lost from Meta’s use of user research products,’ does not know whether other competitors collected similar information, and does not know whether any of Meta’s research provided Meta with a competitive advantage.”
This conflicts with testimony from a Snapchat executive, who alleged that the project “hamper[ed] Snap’s ability to sell ads” by causing “advertisers to not have a clear narrative differentiating Snapchat from Facebook and Instagram.” Both internally and externally, “the intelligence Meta gleaned from this project was described” as “devastating to Snapchat’s ads business,” a court filing said.
On Saturday, US District Judge Lynn Winmill denied Kochava’s motion to dismiss an amended FTC complaint, which he said plausibly argued that “Kochava’s data sales invade consumers’ privacy and expose them to risks of secondary harms by third parties.”
Winmill’s ruling reversed a dismissal of the FTC’s initial complaint, which the court previously said failed to adequately allege that Kochava’s data sales cause or are likely to cause a “substantial” injury to consumers.
The FTC has accused Kochava of selling “a substantial amount of data obtained from millions of mobile devices across the world”—allegedly combining precise geolocation data with a “staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information” without users’ knowledge or informed consent. This data, the FTC alleged, “is not anonymized and is linked or easily linkable to individual consumers” without mining “other sources of data.”
Kochava’s data sales allegedly allow its customers—whom the FTC noted often pay tens of thousands of dollars monthly—to target specific individuals by combining Kochava data sets. Using just Kochava data, marketers can create “highly granular” portraits of ad targets such as “a woman who visits a particular building, the woman’s name, email address, and home address, and whether the woman is African-American, a parent (and if so, how many children), or has an app identifying symptoms of cancer on her phone.” Just one of Kochava’s databases “contains ‘comprehensive profiles of individual consumers,’ with up to ‘300 data points’ for ‘over 300 million unique individuals,'” the FTC reported.
This harms consumers, the FTC alleged, in “two distinct ways”—by invading their privacy and by causing “an increased risk of suffering secondary harms, such as stigma, discrimination, physical violence, and emotional distress.”
In its amended complaint, the FTC overcame deficiencies in its initial complaint by citing specific examples of consumers already known to have been harmed by brokers sharing sensitive data without their consent. That included a Catholic priest who resigned after he was outed by a group using precise mobile geolocation data to track his personal use of Grindr and his movements to “LGBTQ+-associated locations.” The FTC also pointed to invasive practices by journalists using precise mobile geolocation data to identify and track military and law enforcement officers over time, as well as data brokers tracking “abortion-minded women” who visited reproductive health clinics to target them with ads about abortion and alternatives to abortion.
“Kochava’s practices intrude into the most private areas of consumers’ lives and cause or are likely to cause substantial injury to consumers,” the FTC’s amended complaint said.
The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Kochava from allegedly selling sensitive data without user consent.
Kochava considers the examples of consumer harms in the FTC’s amended complaint as “anecdotes” disconnected from its own activities. The data broker was seemingly so confident that Winmill would agree to dismiss the FTC’s amended complaint that the company sought sanctions against the FTC for what it construed as a “baseless” filing. According to Kochava, many of the FTC’s allegations were “knowingly false.”
Ultimately, the court found no evidence that the FTC’s complaints were baseless. Instead of dismissing the case and ordering the FTC to pay sanctions, Winmill wrote in his order that Kochava’s motion to dismiss “misses the point” of the FTC’s filing, which was to allege that Kochava’s data sales are “likely” to cause alleged harms. Because the FTC had “significantly” expanded factual allegations, the agency “easily” satisfied the plausibility standard to allege substantial harms were likely, Winmill said.
Kochava CEO and founder Charles Manning said in a statement provided to Ars that Kochava “expected” Winmill’s ruling and is “confident” that Kochava “will prevail on the merits.”
“This case is really about the FTC attempting to make an end-run around Congress to create data privacy law,” Manning said. “The FTC’s salacious hypotheticals in its amended complaint are mere scare tactics. Kochava has always operated consistently and proactively in compliance with all rules and laws, including those specific to privacy.”
“Where consumers seek out health care, receive counseling, or celebrate their faith is private information that shouldn’t be sold to the highest bidder,” Levine said. “The FTC is taking Kochava to court to protect people’s privacy and halt the sale of their sensitive geolocation information.”
Patreon, a monetization platform for content creators, has asked a federal judge to deem unconstitutional a rarely invoked law that some privacy advocates consider one of the nation’s “strongest protections of consumer privacy against a specific form of data collection.” Such a ruling would end decades that the US spent carefully shielding the privacy of millions of Americans’ personal video viewing habits.
The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) blocks businesses from sharing data with third parties on customers’ video purchases and rentals. At a minimum, the VPPA requires written consent each time a business wants to share this sensitive video data—including the title, description, and, in most cases, the subject matter.
The VPPA was passed in 1988 in response to backlash over a reporter sharing the video store rental history of a judge, Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. The report revealed that Bork apparently liked spy thrillers and British costume dramas and suggested that maybe the judge had a family member who dug John Hughes movies.
Although the videos that Bork rented “revealed nothing particularly salacious” about the judge, the intent of reporting the “Bork Tapes” was to confront the judge “with his own vulnerability to privacy harms” during a time when the Supreme Court nominee had “criticized the constitutional right to privacy” as “a loose canon in the law,” Harvard Law Review noted.
Even though no harm was caused by sharing the “Bork Tapes,” policymakers on both sides of the aisle agreed that First Amendment protections ought to safeguard the privacy of people’s viewing habits, or else risk chilling their speech by altering their viewing habits. The US government has not budged on this stance since, supporting a lawsuit filed in 2022 by Patreon users who claimed that while no harms were caused, damages are owed after Patreon allegedly violated the VPPA by sharing data on videos they watched on the platform with Facebook through Meta Pixel without users’ written consent.
“Restricting the ability of those who possess a consumer’s video purchase, rental, or request history to disclose such information directly advances the goal of keeping that information private and protecting consumers’ intellectual freedom,” the Department of Justice’s brief said.
The Meta Pixel is a piece of code used by companies like Patreon to better target content to users by tracking their activity and monitoring conversions on Meta platforms. “In simplest terms,” Patreon users said in an amended complaint, “the Pixel allows Meta to know what video content one of its users viewed on Patreon’s website.”
The Pixel is currently at the center of a pile of privacy lawsuits, where people have accused various platforms of using the Pixel to covertly share sensitive data without users’ consent, including health and financial data.
Several lawsuits have specifically lobbed VPPA claims, which users have argued validates the urgency of retaining the VPPA protections that Patreon now seeks to strike. The DOJ argued that “the explosion of recent VPPA cases” is proof “that the disclosures the statute seeks to prevent are a legitimate concern,” despite Patreon’s arguments that the statute does “nothing to materially or directly advance the privacy interests it supposedly was enacted to protect.”
Patreon’s attack on the VPPA
Patreon has argued in a recent court filing that the VPPA was not enacted to protect average video viewers from embarrassing and unwarranted disclosures but “for the express purpose of silencing disclosures about political figures and their video-watching, an issue of undisputed continuing public interest and concern.”
That’s one of many ways that the VPPA silences speech, Patreon argued, by allegedly preventing disclosures regarding public figures that are relevant to public interest.
Among other “fatal flaws,” Patreon alleged, the VPPA “restrains speech” while “doing little if anything to protect privacy” and never protecting privacy “by the least restrictive means.”
Patreon claimed that the VPPA is too narrow, focusing only on pre-recorded videos. It prevents video service providers from disclosing to any other person the titles of videos that someone watched, but it does not necessarily stop platforms from sharing information about “the genres, performers, directors, political views, sexual content, and every other detail of pre-recorded video that those consumers watch,” Patreon claimed.
Meta will allow some Facebook and Instagram users to unlink their accounts as part of the platform’s efforts to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of enforcement starting March 1.
In a blog, Meta’s competition and regulatory director, Tim Lamb, wrote that Instagram and Facebook users in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland would be notified in the “next few weeks” about “more choices about how they can use” Meta’s services and features, including new opportunities to limit data-sharing across apps and services.
Most significantly, users can choose to either keep their accounts linked or “manage their Instagram and Facebook accounts separately so that their information is no longer used across accounts.” Up to this point, linking user accounts had provided Meta with more data to more effectively target ads to more users. The perk of accessing data on Instagram’s widening younger user base, TechCrunch noted, was arguably the $1 billion selling point explaining why Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012.
Also announced today, users protected by the DMA will soon be able to separate their Facebook Messenger, Marketplace, and Gaming accounts. However, doing so will limit some social features available in some of the standalone apps.
While Messenger users choosing to disconnect the chat service from their Facebook accounts will still “be able to use Messenger’s core service offering such as private messaging and chat, voice and video calling,” Marketplace users making that same choice will have to email sellers and buyers, rather than using Facebook’s messenger service. And unlinked Gaming app users will only be able to play single-player games, severing their access to social gaming otherwise supported by linking the Gaming service to their Facebook social networks.
While Meta may have had choices other than depriving users unlinking accounts of some features, Meta didn’t really have a choice in allowing newly announced options to unlink accounts. The DMA specifically requires that very large platforms designated as “gatekeepers” give users the “specific choice” of opting out of sharing personal data across a platform’s different core services or across any separate services that the gatekeepers manage.
Without gaining “specific” consent, gatekeepers will no longer be allowed to “combine personal data from the relevant core platform service with personal data from any further core platform services” or “cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper,” the DMA says. The “specific” requirement is designed to block platforms from securing consent at sign-up, then hoovering up as much personal data as possible as new services are added in an endless pursuit of advertising growth.
As defined under the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU requiring “specific” consent stops platforms from gaining user consent for broadly defined data processing by instead establishing “the need for granularity,” so that platforms always seek consent for each “specific” data “processing purpose.”
“This is an important ‘safeguard against the gradual widening or blurring of purposes for which data is processed, after a data subject has agreed to the initial collection of the data,’” the European Data Protection Supervisor explained in public comments describing “commercial surveillance and data security practices that harm consumers” provided at the request of the FTC in 2022.
According to Meta’s help page, once users opt out of sharing data between apps and services, Meta will “stop combining your info across these accounts” within 15 days “after you’ve removed them.” However, all “previously combined info would remain combined.”
Content creators have spent the past five years developing new tactics to evade YouTube’s policies blocking monetization of videos making false claims about climate change, a report from a nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), warned Tuesday.
What the CCDH found is that content creators who could no longer monetize videos spreading “old” forms of climate denial—including claims that “global warming is not happening” or “human-generated greenhouse gasses are not causing global warming”—have moved on.
Now they’re increasingly pushing other claims that contradict climate science, which YouTube has not yet banned and may not ever ban. These include harmful claims that “impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless,” “climate solutions won’t work,” and “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”
The CCDH uncovered these new climate-denial tactics by using artificial intelligence to scan transcripts of 12,058 videos posted on 96 YouTube channels that the CCDH found had previously posted climate-denial content. Verified by researchers, the AI model used was judged accurate in labeling climate-denial content approximately 78 percent of the time.
According to the CCDH’s analysis, the amount of content disputing climate solutions, climate science, and impacts of climate change today comprises 70 percent of climate-denial content—a percent that doubled from 2018 to 2023. At the same time, the amount of content pushing old climate-denial claims that are harder or impossible to monetize fell from 65 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2023.
These “new forms of climate denial,” the CCDH warned, are designed to delay climate action by spreading disinformation.
“A new front has opened up in this battle,” Imran Ahmed, the CCDH’s chief executive, said on a call with reporters, according to Reuters. “The people that we’ve been looking at, they’ve gone from saying climate change isn’t happening to now saying, ‘Hey, climate change is happening, but there is no hope. There are no solutions.'”
Since 2018—based on “estimates of typical ad pricing on YouTube” by social media analytics tool Social Blade—YouTube may have profited by as much as $13.4 million annually from videos flagged by the CCDH. And YouTube confirmed that some of these videos featured climate denialism that YouTube already explicitly bans.
In response to the CCDH’s report, YouTube de-monetized some videos found to be in violation of its climate change policy. But a spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the majority of videos that the CCDH found were considered compliant with YouTube’s ad policies.
The fact that most of these videos remain compliant is precisely why the CCDH is calling on YouTube to update its policies, though.
Currently, YouTube’s policy prohibits monetization of content “that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” YouTube’s spokesperson told Ars. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos. We also display information panels under relevant videos to provide additional information on climate change and context from third parties.”
The CCDH worries that YouTube standing by its current policy is too short-sighted. The group recommended tweaking the policy to instead specify that YouTube prohibits content “that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.”
If YouTube and other social media platforms don’t acknowledge new forms of climate denial and “urgently” update their disinformation policies in response, these new attacks on climate change science “will only increase,” the CCDH warned.
“It is vital that those advocating for action to avert climate disaster take note of this substantial shift from denial of anthropogenic climate change to undermining trust in both solutions and science itself, and shift our focus, our resources and our counternarratives accordingly,” the CCDH’s report said, adding that “demonetizing climate-denial” content “removes the economic incentives underpinning its creation and protects advertisers from bankrolling harmful content.”
