Amazon should be forced to disclose how Jeff Bezos and others were instructed to use the Signal disappearing-message app, FTC says

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday asked a judge to force Amazon to reveal what it tells company leaders about using the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive topics and about preserving documents related to antitrust matters, according to a new court filing.

In its filing, the FTC said it seeks "to compel Amazon to produce documents related to the company’s failure to preserve Signal messages, namely Amazon’s document preservation notices and its instructions about the use of ephemeral messaging applications, including Signal."

The filing marks the latest salvo in what could be a years-long antitrust battle between the regulatory agency and the Seattle-based tech giant. In September, the Lina Khan-run FTC filed a historic suit against Amazon, arguing that the Jeff Bezos-founded company has illegally maintained a monopoly and artificially raised prices for consumers through policies and practices related to the treatment of its hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers. Amazon has said the suit is meritless and that it will fight it in court; a trial is not slated to begin until October 2026.

In the fall, the FTC alleged that Amazon executives destroyed evidence by using Signal for communications for several years after the agency had informed the company in 2019 that it was under investigation and should preserve all relevant documents and correspondences. The agency has said that executives, including Bezos and current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, used Signal, which includes a disappearing-message feature that can permanently delete messages if the user turns it on.

"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," the FTC claims in the new filing. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed."

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.”

When the FTC's original allegations about evidence destruction went public in the fall, Amazon called them "baseless" and argued that Amazon had "voluntarily" disclosed the use of Signal to the agency and turned over messages that hadn't automatically been deleted.

But in the new filing, the FTC claims that Amazon only did so six days before a news report reported on the use of Signal by company executives.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com