As reported in the Washington Post, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has accused top Amazon executives, including former CEO Jeff Bezos, of using the messaging app Signal and specifically its automatic message deletion feature to hide communications, even after the FTC ordered the archiving of those records.
Amazon was allegedly directed to stop deleting messages after it was notified in 2019 that the FTC was investigating it for antitrust violations.
According to Law.com: “The FTC said in a heavily redacted brief on Friday that it’s missing both the ‘raw notes’ of important meetings and key messages from the Signal apps of Bezos and other senior executives, who, in some instances, set messages to automatically delete in ‘as short as ten seconds or one minute.’”
In a separate motion that the FTC filed in May 2024 (a motion to compel), the regulator said it seeks to overcome Amazon’s claim of privilege over the messages by stating as follows: “Plaintiffs easily meet the ‘preliminary showing of spoliation’ standard required to overcome Amazon’s privilege assertions. There is ample evidence suggesting that spoliation occurred. Key Amazon executives, including Mr. Bezos, conducted Amazon business using Signal for years. Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during Plaintiffs’ pre-complaint investigation, and Amazon did not instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages until over fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs’ investigation was underway. It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon’s actions and inactions. Plaintiffs should be allowed discovery into Amazon’s document preservation efforts (or the lack thereof) so that they can determine the full extent of the possible spoliation.”
Both the redacted brief examined by news outlets and the motion to compel imply the following: Amazon’s systems and the Signal app contained messaging between Amazon’s senior executives that, per Law360, “was unfavorable to Amazon on all issues disputed at trial, including market definition, monopoly power, the anticompetitive nature of Amazon’s conduct, and the harm from Amazon’s conduct.”
One of the accusations against the company and executives is that Bezos and the company’s top lawyer started using the app’s disappearing message function in April 2019 “and continued using it well after Amazon was aware of plaintiffs’ pre-complaint investigation and Amazon’s duty to preserve documents.”
Amazon responds
In response to the FTC’s most recent brief, Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said in a statement: “The FTC has a complete picture of Amazon’s decision-making in this case including 1.7 million documents from sources like email, internal messaging applications, and laptops (among other sources), and over 100 terabytes of data.”
And in its own court filing, Amazon says it “went above and beyond its legal obligations and invited FTC staff to outside counsel’s offices to review the entirety of collected Signal conversations in which DM [(direct messaging)] had been enabled, without regard to whether those messages were responsive to the FTC’s document requests.”
A trial in the overarching antitrust case is set for October 2026.
The FTC, then overseen by Lina Khan, plus some state attorneys general, have accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly and artificially raising prices for consumers through policies and practices related to the treatment of its hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers. They purport that the company forced merchants on its site to use its own logistics service and leveraged “price surveillance” tools to penalize merchants selling products at cheaper prices on other sites.
The motion to compel mentions this, and it’s important background to note that although the contents of deleted messages are impossible to recover, ephemeral messaging apps “still capture details of when a user turns the disappearing message feature on, off, or changes the timer for deletions, leaving breadcrumbs showing that Amazon executives’ deletions were widespread.”
Ephemeral messaging such as the Signal app poses significant risks to regulated businesses, including what is being alleged here (the destruction of evidence before or during legal proceedings and investigations), plus regulatory agency requirements around recordkeeping and possible concealment of corporate misconduct. It also is not a smart idea from a data security standpoint, as it compromises the ability of the security and audit teams to review records comprehensively and conduct informed audits and security tests.