Snap kept files named ‘Project Voldemort’ on Facebook’s competitive moves

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat kept a track of Facebook's competitive moves against it in a dossier called 'Project Voldemort', a Wall Street Journal report has revealed.

Snap’s dossier has references that “chronicled Facebook moves that Snap officials believed were a threat to undermine Snap’s business”. (Image: Bloomberg)

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat kept a track of Facebook’s competitive moves against it in a dossier called ‘Project Voldemort’, a Wall Street Journal report has revealed. Named after the fictional character and the main antagonist in Harry Potter novel series, the dossier has references that “chronicled Facebook moves that Snap officials believed were a threat to undermine Snap’s business,” the report added.

This also included its moves to allegedly discourage Instagram influencers from referencing Snap on their accounts and preventing Snap content from trending on the Instagram app. The report quoted people from Facebook’s competitors who spoke to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about its “hardball tactics”, as part of FTC’s investigations into the social media company’s privacy practices, which began after the Cambridge Analytica debacle of 2016.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook has close to one billion active users worldwide. Many features that we see on the app have been copied from Snapchat like the disappearing Stories, AR filters, etc. Stories helped the platform grow big quickly since it was rolled out in August 2016. By October, the feature had 100 million daily active users. In 2017, Instagram Stories surpassed Snapchat in terms of daily active users. As of now, Instagram Stories is used by over 500 million people globally every day.

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As a part of its investigations, FTC has also contacted executives as well as app developers related to or affected by Facebook’s growth, as per WSJ. “The discussions have focused on the aggressive growth tactics that propelled Facebook from a social network for college students 15 years ago to a collection of services now used by more than one in four people in the world every day,” the report read.

Earlier this year, the FTC approved a fine of $5 billion for Facebook, which stems from the company’s alleged violations of a 2012 FTC settlement order over privacy issues. The FTC said in a statement that this is the largest ever penalty imposed on any company for violating consumers.

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