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That Facebook is a company that does not act completely clean, it is not necessary to repeat it more times. In recent years, the scandals, appearances of its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg; Investigations and all kinds of security flaws have made it clear that it is not just a social network in which to upload photos of your family.
At times, it seems a power structure capable of altering the outcome of the elections and causing all kinds of problems, both for companies and for civil society. And that's where the 'Voldemort project' comes in, which beyond portraying Zuckerberg as a fantasy book villain , exposes how far his tricks come to succeed in the technology industry.
Snapchat, on war footing
In 2013, Facebook tried to buy the social network Snapchat for 3,000 million dollars . Evan Spiegel, its founder, stood firm. I was not interested in his creation ending as Instagram.
Zuckerberg tried again in 2016 and 2017 , in an attempt to curb the company's market launch. Trading on the stock market, getting your most innovative rival would become prohibitive. It didn't work either.
Frustrated by these decisions, Facebook decided to go on the offensive. Snapchat's most popular features, such as ephemeral user stories or augmented reality filters for cameras, were copied without blush on the company's different platforms, such as Instagram, Messenger or Facebook itself. If you can't with the enemy, become him.
But Snap, the parent company of Snapchat , did not sit idly by. In recent years, his legal team has recorded all instances in which Facebook demonstrated abusive behavior.
He has done so in a dossier baptized as 'Voldemort project', in reference to the villain of the Harry Potter book saga, and it is a compendium that could become a key piece of the monopoly investigation that the Federal Trade Commission -the FTC for its acronym in English - has opened against the Zuckerberg company .
If you are not with me, you are against me
According to the Wall Street Journal, the dossier includes meetings and meetings in which Facebook offered its rivals two unique scenarios: or they accepted the conditions imposed by the company or Facebook would copy the functions that made the platforms popular , implementing them at a scale in which the Small start-ups could not compete. Facebook, after all, has more than 2 billion users across the planet, an audience far superior to that of any of its rivals.
These ultimatum were not directed only to Snap. Foursquare , the popular application to discover new stores and restaurants, was also one of the victims of this abuse, for example, and the entry of Facebook into its territory forced the company to change strategy and leave the social component, a decision that It brought a great loss of relevance.
But the resentment and viciousness employed in competing against Snap was of another order of magnitude. According to the documents of the Voldemort project, Facebook came to block the references to Snapchat that the biggest influencers made on Instagram, for fear that the competing network would steal the audience. The content he disregarded with references to Snapchat never became prominent in the rankings.
Facebook could also have forced the best-known Instagram users not to make references to the Snapchat social network in their profiles under penalty of losing the prestigious status of 'verified'.
This investigation is independent of the fine to Facebook for the misuse of the personal data of its users in the case of Cambridge Analytica, the largest ever imposed on a technology company and that Facebook had to pay last July.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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