The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a court filing on Thursday that Amazon executives, including founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy, discussed “sensitive business matters” in text messages now deleted that could have been used as evidence in the FTC’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.
According to Thursday’s filings, senior Amazon executives used the encrypted messaging app Signal from April 2019 to May 2022 and continued to delete messages through the app’s disappearing message feature, even as the FTC was investigating Amazon.
“Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during Plaintiffs’ pre-complaint investigations, and Amazon did not instruct employees to retain Signal messages until fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs’ investigations were ongoing “, the FTC wrote in the filing.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
The FTC named Bezos, as well as other senior executives like top Amazon lawyer David Zapolsky, as some of the leaders who used Signal and its disappearing messages feature.
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The filing is just one part of a larger antitrust case that began in September when the FTC sued Amazon, accusing the retail giant of illegally maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices.
Amazon responded that the lawsuit could negatively impact both consumers who purchase on its higher-priced platform and independent businesses that sell products through it.
In Thursday’s filing, the FTC asked for more information about how Amazon leadership told employees to communicate on Signal, including when to use it and whether there were specific instructions about deleting messages.
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Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle told Bloomberg that the FTC’s allegations were “unfounded” and that Amazon had disclosed its use of Signal to the FTC “years ago.”
Doyle also told Business Insider that “the FTC has a complete picture of Amazon’s decision-making process in this case, including 1.7 million documents from sources such as emails, internal messaging applications, and laptops (among other sources ) and over 100 terabytes of data.”