Lauren Feiner

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.

During cross-examination, we’ve been looking at a 2019 deck the former Biden official, Facebook co-founder, and the FTC’s now-expert Scott Hemphill pitched to regulators, describing why they should investigate the company on antitrust grounds, based on public reporting and data. Meta attorney Mark Hansen says the FTC nor Hemphill produced the slides to them, so it’s not clear where they came from, and when they change slides, we can see they’re from a photo of a phone, where someone’s finger is visible.

Presented with a side-by-side screenshot of the three short-form video products on the same Saturday Night Live video, Hemphill takes a long pause to identify the apps before he’s saying he’s not sure which is which.

Meta’s lead attorney Mark Hansen is using cross-examination to attack Hemphill’s credibility. Hansen calls him the “very definition” of a witness with preconceived notions about Meta’s liability and brings up what a press report called a “roadshow” he embarked on in 2019 with former Biden administration official Tim Wu and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to encourage state and federal enforcers to look into Meta’s potentially anticompetitive behavior. Hansen charges that Hemphill hasn’t adequately disclosed this activity, which the Meta attorney characterizes as advocacy for a cause. Hemphill says he wasn’t advocating that they bring a case, but to probe and find out if a valid case existed.