Meta (Facebook) faces new antitrust lawsuit from Phhhoto for cloning their feature

The founders of a defunct photo-sharing startup, are now suing Meta, formerly known as Facebook, over allegations that the company violated antitrust laws by cloning their app with Instagram’s Boomerang feature and ultimately crushing their business.

Phhhoto was launched in 2014 by Champ Bennett, Omar Elsayed, and Russell Armand, which enabled users to take and post a short bust of photos that looped, similar to a GIF. The newly filed lawsuit, alleges that Facebook wanted to squash the competition by cutting off the app’s access by dismissing a proposed relationship and then eventually cloning its own copy of Phhhoto’s core feature: the seconds-long looping video. This was eventually introduced as the Boomerang feature on Instagram, which Facebook had bought in 2012 for $1 billion.