Meta Platforms faces renewed scrutiny over its dominant market position and acquisition strategy, as regulatory bodies in the United States and South Africa challenge what critics call a 'buy or bury' approach to competitive threats. In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook (now Meta) in conjunction with 46 states, alleging that the company's purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014—which the FTC had previously approved—allowed Meta to accrue monopoly power in the social media sector. Meanwhile, South Africa's Competition Commission has pursued a parallel case involving GovChat, a civic-tech platform that Meta allegedly suppressed through WhatsApp's Business Terms of Service. The dispute highlights broader concerns about social media's impact on society, particularly on young people, and raises questions about whether dominant platforms use procedural complexity to outlast smaller competitors.
Meta's Acquisition Strategy and FTC Legal Challenge
According to Daryl Dingley, Partner at Webber Wentzel, Meta appears to habitually leverage its dominant position by either purchasing competitors or undermining them through limiting ecosystem access. "It's a strategy referred to as 'buy or bury', with Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg himself saying in a 2008 email that 'it is better to buy than compete'," Dingley states.
The FTC lawsuit saw the court initially side with Meta in December 2025. The FTC appealed the decision in January 2026 on fundamentally the same grounds. Meta's provision for litigation and damages is evidently over 6 billion euros. In March 2026, a US jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people.
GovChat: A Civic-Tech Success Story
GovChat's story began in 2016 as a distinctly South African civic-tech success. Designated as the official citizen-government engagement platform under the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA), it allowed citizens to report service disruptions such as water outages and rate municipal performance.
According to Tandi Haslam, the former Chief Financial Officer of GovChat, the platform's impact expanded dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, usage surged. The platform assisted millions with testing-site locations, pandemic information, and SASSA grant processes, peaking at over 12 million messages per day via WhatsApp," Haslam explains. "Its powerful innovation model aggregated anonymous citizen data to provide government with holistic, real-time insights across traditionally siloed departments, fostering coordination, responsiveness, and accountability with potential for global application."
WhatsApp was the logical choice for a communications channel, with up to 96% of active Internet users in South Africa using it at least monthly in 2020.
The Offboarding and Legal Battle
In July 2020, Meta issued notices alleging GovChat's non-compliance with WhatsApp's Business Terms of Service. Offboarding followed in November 2020 despite GovChat's remedial efforts. The South African company approached the Competition Tribunal in the same month.
GovChat's aggregating data for cross-departmental, public-service insights reportedly violated Meta's limits on data handling and multi-client structures. A March 2021 Competition Tribunal interdict offered temporary protection, but the prolonged uncertainty left any further fundraising efforts by GovChat stillborn, with the company and its groundbreaking tool entering business rescue.
A Five-Year Legal Journey
"So far, GovChat's legal journey, pursued doggedly by the Competition Commission and the startup, has spanned more than five years, with mounting legal costs and no definitive end in sight," explains Daryl Dingley.
"Meta's strategy since November 2020 is one highly familiar to South Africans: a 'Stalingrad' approach that leverages procedural complexity, due process, and delay to induce significant financial and operational strain on challengers."
The Broader Stakes
Ironically, while Meta claims harm in how GovChat interacted with WhatsApp, the American company uses WhatsApp in the exact way: it leverages user data from WhatsApp to inform content recommendations and advertising when the same users interact with Instagram or Facebook. As Tandi Haslam notes, it's a closed system, with Meta both player and referee in a game designed to perpetuate its dominance.
"The stakes extend far beyond one startup. South Africa forfeited a proven channel for accountable governance and responsive service delivery. Innovation suffers when critical infrastructure faces arbitrary withdrawal amid lengthy disputes, and smaller firms with limited resources bear disproportionate burdens, all while Meta entrenches its power," Haslam says.
"The Competition Commission deserves commendation for its unwavering commitment to the public interest despite clear asymmetries in resources and power. It and GovChat's persistence demonstrates that South African institutions and private actors will not readily yield to monopoly, scale or delay, particularly from foreign companies whose conduct is predatory."
