The US Federal Trade Commission has confirmed it will challenge a court ruling that cleared Meta Platforms Inc. of holding an unlawful monopoly in social media.

In a judgment delivered in November, District Judge James Boasberg concluded that Meta’s past purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp did not breach competition law. He found that the company could not be considered dominant in social networking because it faces strong rivalry from services such as Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and the short-form video platform TikTok.

The regulator strongly disagrees with that assessment. FTC spokesman Joe Simonson said the agency maintains that Meta broke antitrust rules by buying Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing that the scale of its influence was already obvious when the case was launched in 2020 during Donald Trump’s first term as president.

Meta rejected the criticism and welcomed the original ruling. Company spokesman Christopher Sgro said the decision properly reflected the intense competitive pressure Meta operates under and added that the group would continue to prioritise innovation and investment across the United States.

For the FTC, the outcome marked a significant setback. The lawsuit, filed six years ago, had sought to force a break-up of the technology group by unwinding its major acquisitions.

Despite the loss, the watchdog has now lodged a formal notice of appeal and is preparing a detailed submission for the higher court. According to a senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to internal deliberations, the agency believes the judge focused too heavily on today’s market rather than conditions at the time the case was brought. The official also argued that Instagram still does not compete directly with YouTube or TikTok, even now.

Meanwhile, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has spent much of the past year building ties with President Donald Trump and his administration. Those efforts have coincided with notable shifts inside the company, including changes to content moderation policies, the removal of external fact-checking programmes and the scaling back of diversity initiatives.