Slate: “Facebook has spent much of the past four years kowtowing to conservatives, treating right-wing news outlets with kid gloves even as they flouted its rules and spread disinformation, while bending over backward to avoid offending the Trump administration. By almost all accounts, the company hoped that playing nice would stave off any kind of serious regulatory crackdown on its business, or at least spare it some angry presidential tweets (while, of course, keeping Republican eyeballs glued to its news feed).”

“This strategy seems to have failed rather badly. On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission, along with 46 states and D.C. and Guam, filed a massive pair of antitrust suits accusing Facebook of illegally monopolizing the social-media market by buying up potential rivals such as Instagram and WhatsApp while freezing out third-party developers from its platform unless they promised not to create competing services. The government is seeking to break the company up as punishment. Unlike the antitrust suit the Justice Department launched against Google earlier this year, this does not appear to be a rushed PR play – it’s a concerted, full-frontal assault on Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. And Republicans are very much along for the charge. The FTC’s GOP Chairman, Joseph Simons, whom Trump appointed in 2018, voted with two of his Democratic colleagues to authorize the suit. Among the states that have joined the effort, almost as many are represented by a Republican attorney general as a Democrat. How did Facebook’s efforts to court conservatives bear so little fruit?”