Lauren Feiner

Hemphill clarifies that he did disclose to Meta during his deposition over a year ago that he and former Biden official Tim Wu had a “conversation” with the FTC in 2019 about investigating Meta, but the company never asked him for a copy of the presentation. He says he wasn’t compensated for it, and wasn’t retained by the FTC for another two and a half years — during which he also didn’t lobby the regulator to bring a case. He says that public reporting of Meta’s conduct “seemed like the kind of thing that we’d been worried about in our academic work,” but that he hadn’t formed a view at the time that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive.

Back to friendlier-questioning from the FTC, Hemphill says that while ad quality might be improving, Meta is behaving like a monopolist in what it chooses to do with those quality gains. In a more competitive environment, Hemphill says, Meta would pass on those gains to consumers by letting them enjoy the same amount of ads, but at a higher quality. Instead, he says, Meta dials up the knob to show them more ads.

This is how Hansen closes what’s been a tense cross-examination of Hemphill. Meta has used the exam to try to discredit the FTC’s key economic expert, and Hansen reiterates that Hemphill had “preconceived” notions about the case, calling back to the 2019 “roadshow” he participated in to convince regulators to investigate Meta. Hemphill has been on the stand since Monday afternoon, and the FTC attorney Krisha Cerilli is back for redirect questioning.

This is what Hansen asks the FTC expert after showing a chart that shows younger cohorts spend a higher percentage of time on the platform engaging with friends than older cohorts, yet they get served fewer ads — seemingly contrary to Hemphill’s claim that Meta taxes users who enjoy friend sharing more. Hemphill says the point is “apples and oranges” and that the older cohort makes up 60 to 70 percent of the user base getting higher ad loads. That prompts Hansen to ask whether he thinks Meta discriminates against such a large portion of its users, and Hemphill says it’s “a standard understanding of price discrimination.”

Hemphill doesn’t cite any documents or testimony that directly say Meta engages in this kind of behavior by showing these users more ads. Hansen says. Hemphill responds that his conclusion comes from the evidence of price discrimination in how Meta chooses to serve ads to different users, recognizing which are more or less engaged with their services. But, he acknowledges, “I’m not aware of a single document that connects the dots in that exact way.”

Hansen accuses Hemphill of altering the axis on charts showing user sentiment about Meta, calling it “misleading to crop the axis to magnify changes that aren’t changes.” When Hemphill describes the sentiment metrics as in “clear decline,” Hansen shoots back, “there’s no decline. It’s flat. Flat as a pancake.”

If users don’t want to see an ad, they can scroll past it in “a second or less,” Meta’s Hansen says. Hemphill agrees that “not every ad is burdensome” and users can gain value from some of them, but on the whole they are a burdensome part of the social media experience for users. Hemphill adds that he hasn’t “made a study of scroll time, though I agree that scrolling past an ad does not take long.”

Hansen charges that Hemphill’s conclusions would mean Meta would need to pay consumers to use its services in order to make it any cheaper than it already is — free. Hemphill has testified that under a more competitive social media market, there would be a greater “surplus” for consumers. Hemphill says Meta wouldn’t necessarily have to pay users in cold hard cash. Alternatively, it could offer them some other kind of reward they’d consider valuable.

Meta’s lead attorney Mark Hansen is continuing cross-examination of the FTC’s economic expert Scott Hemphill this morning. Hansen brings up this incident that Meta has repeatedly come back to at trial to show that TikTok users see Facebook and Instagram as reasonable alternatives, even though the government says they don’t compete for the same market Meta dominates. He says Facebook saw 20 percent of diverted usage from TikTok during its January 2025 outage, and Instagram, 17 percent.