The government says Meta broke the law when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. The trial starts today. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner details the case. The Trump administration has purposely classified thousands of living immigrants as dead. Lisa Rein from the Washington Post explains why. Universities are coming off a pandemic that closed campuses and reduced enrollment numbers. These days, they’re contending with the Trump administration’s disruptive cuts to research. Bloomberg’s Elizabeth Rembert discusses what affected researchers have told her. Plus, Trump said tariffs are coming for smartphones and other electronics, Gaza’s last functioning hospital was attacked, and police made an arrest after a man allegedly set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: Who is hosting the episode and what topics will be covered?
Good morning. It's Monday, April 14th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, why the Social Security Administration is declaring some people dead falsely and on purpose. Higher ed institutions are doing disaster budgeting. And those tariff exemptions for smartphones and other electronics will be short-lived.
Chapter 2: What is the legal case against Meta about?
But first, social media giant Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is in court starting today in a massive antitrust trial that could change the entire social media landscape. The Federal Trade Commission alleges the company violated antitrust laws when it acquired Instagram in 2012 and the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
Lauren Feiner is a senior policy writer for The Verge, and she told us the government is arguing Meta with those acquisitions essentially became a monopoly.
Meta ended up growing its dominance and cutting off what could have been really formidable competitors to its dominance, and that it did that in order to retain this power in the market so that no one else could really come up against it.
The FTC cites a 2012 email in its argument where Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg names startups like Instagram as potentially disruptive to its business. Meta says the company always competes fairly and is facing punishment for its success in growing those apps into major players in the social media world.
Feiner says the crux of the FTC's argument is that Meta monopolizes personal social networking services, a definition that will matter a lot in this case. The way the FTC views it.
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Chapter 3: How does the FTC define Meta’s alleged monopoly?
They basically say, look, there are this very tiny group of social networking apps that are really used just to connect with other people, to connect with friends and family. You use them differently than an app like YouTube or TikTok, where maybe you're primarily scrolling through and passively watching content.
And you're also using it differently than like a LinkedIn, where you're really trying to use it to find a job or make career connections. This is really about personal social networking.
Meta sees the space differently.
Chapter 4: What is Meta’s response to the antitrust allegations?
They say, you know, we really compete in this really vast and varied social media landscape that includes TikTok, that includes YouTube, that includes all of these other social media apps that really look a lot alike.
It's important to point out that the acquisitions in question were vetted and cleared by the FTC more than a decade ago. The government, however, now says Meta may not have been forthcoming during that process. As all of this is going on, Zuckerberg has sought to curry favor with President Trump. Meta settled a previous lawsuit over the banning of Trump's accounts.
And Zuckerberg reportedly made trips to Mar-a-Lago and the White House to personally lobby Trump to direct the FTC to drop this antitrust case. Feiner says it's yet to be seen whether or not that investment will pay off for Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs who have lobbied Trump. Feiner says a recent decision against Google also matters here.
A judge ruled that Google illegally monopolized the online search market, which could open the door for other important cases to go against big tech companies.
It was really impactful to see a judge reach that conclusion after all of this rethinking about how antitrust laws should be enforced in the digital age.
If Meta loses this case, the government could force it to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp into separate companies. They currently generate billions of dollars for Meta. For consumers, Feiner told us, it could mean potentially better social media platforms in the future.
The government would say that if they won, this could potentially open up the market for social media apps. And maybe if there's things you don't like about social media, maybe there'll be room for a new competitor to come in with a new idea that challenges certain features of social media that maybe wouldn't be able to get off the ground the way the market is right now.
You know, Meta would obviously dispute that theoretical version of the future, but I think that's really what this whole case is about.
The trial is expected to last several weeks. Big name current and former Meta executives like Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are expected to take the stand. Let's turn now to several big changes at the Social Security Administration.
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Chapter 5: What could happen if Meta loses the antitrust lawsuit?
The Social Security Administration entered the names and legally obtained social security numbers of more than 6,000 immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration into a database that the agency uses to track and cancel benefits for dead people.
That effectively canceled their social security numbers, meaning they could soon no longer have the ability to work legally in the United States, open bank accounts and credit cards, secure housing and more.
You really do need a Social Security number to function in this country. And so their economic livelihoods could eventually be cut off.
That's Lisa Rine, a federal government reporter for The Washington Post. She spoke with us about the White House's motivations for this move.
They've said that these people are illegally getting benefits and are not here in the country legally, and they want them to leave.
A White House official told The Post that the people whose social security numbers were canceled had ties to terrorist activity or had criminal records, though Ryan told us they didn't provide evidence to support those claims. They also said nearly 1,000 of these people were receiving benefits through Medicaid, 41 were collecting unemployment, and 22 had student loans.
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Chapter 6: What controversial changes are happening at the Social Security Administration?
Ryan told us the administration's move here is trying to push people to leave the country by cutting off their access to critical financial services.
The government knows that these people are alive. This is not an error. But the government is willfully putting their names in a database where they know they should not be. So that's a violation of the Privacy Act, according to many experts we spoke with. So that seems to be the biggest illegality about this.
This represents a stunning turn in data privacy at the Social Security Administration, where under previous administrations, personal information had been closely guarded. It's just the latest example of the extraordinary measures Elon Musk and his Doge team have employed to access and share personal data that had historically been off limits to immigration authorities.
Chapter 7: Why is the Social Security Administration falsely declaring immigrants dead?
It comes on the heels of another unusual agreement that we talked about on this show, where the IRS recently agreed to share information with the Department of Homeland Security for undocumented immigrants. In recent weeks, President Trump has tried to exert more influence on institutes of higher education by withholding financial support schools have relied on for decades.
The Trump administration paused over $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University. It announced plans to pause an additional $790 million to Northwestern and more than $1 billion to Cornell. And it's threatened to cut $9 billion in contracts and grants at Harvard.
This money helps schools do things like keep the lights on at labs, pay salaries to educators and researchers, and fund research projects. Without it, much of that work comes to a halt. At Northwestern, for example, researchers with federal grants received 100 stop-work orders in recent days, which will impact studies related to Parkinson's disease, nanotechnology, and foreign military training.
Over at the University of Missouri, Bloomberg reporter Elizabeth Rambert spoke to a researcher named Carrie Clark, who recently lost funding for a project that she spent a decade on that took up about a quarter of her work, developing machines to make harvesting processes for farmers in Africa more efficient. Rambert told us about her work.
Farmers who are largely women would have to physically beat the soybean plants with sticks in order for the plants to release the soybeans. And that would take them a week, I think she said, to go through an acre, which is about the size of a football field. So she developed a threshing machine is what they call it, which helps them mechanize the harvesting process.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of immigrants being falsely labeled as dead?
And now they're able to get through that same process. field size in just four hours.
Clark says losing her research funding, which came from USAID, felt like losing a child. And Rembert told us the impact of these kinds of funding cuts could hit far beyond college campuses.
funding to the institutes that provide that funding to schools or proposing new caps on funding, that really imperils a lot of the economy in states where the university systems are a really big part of the jobs or the economies rely on those institutions.
And there are other ways higher ed institutions are being impacted by the administration, through efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, plans to raise endowment taxes, threats to cut funding for schools that support transgender athletes or diversity initiatives, and at schools where students and academics have been outspoken against the war in Gaza.
This expert that I talked to for this article kind of called it like using a bazooka to swat down mosquitoes.
Behind the scenes, colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what they would do if a large chunk of their budget suddenly gets cut. An expert in higher ed told Rembert administrators are likely working on two versions of their budgets right now. One that assumes the status quo stays and another that's a, quote, disaster budget that accounts for losing government support.
Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. First, to the latest on tariffs.
After the Trump administration said electronics like smartphones and computers would be exempt from steep tariffs on China, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick now says that move will be temporary and that President Trump in about a month or two will impose a, quote, special focus type of tariff on those items. Trump posted on social media that he is looking at the whole electronics supply chain.
He says the administration plans to target semiconductors and pharmaceuticals next. some significant developments in Gaza over the weekend. Israel says it has completely encircled the city of Rafah on the border with Egypt and established a security zone separating it and the city of Khan Yunus.
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