The TikTok ban is back in court — in Meta’s antitrust trial

is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform. TikTok is back in a Washington, DC courthouse discussing the US law that — at least on paper — effectively banned the app. But this time, it’s serving as a witness for the government, not fighting against it. On Wednesday, TikTok’s head of operations and trust and safety Adam Presser testified in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Meta, in the same courthouse where a panel of judges ruled that the government could expel TikTok from the country. Presser’s role in the Meta trial was to explain the ways in which TikTok competes (or doesn’t) with Meta’s services in a market the FTC has defined as personal social networking — a category the FTC says contains only Meta’s services, Snapchat, and a small app called MeWe. Lawyers for both the FTC and Meta bro ... Read full article.