Federal Trade Commission (FTC) supposed in a Thursday court filing that Amazon executives, including the founder Jeff Bezos and the CEO Andy Jassydiscussed “sensitive business matters” in now-deleted text messages that could have been used as evidence at the FTC ongoing antitrust case against Amazon.

According to Thursday's filing, senior Amazon executives used the encrypted messaging app Signal from April 2019 to May 2022 and continued to delete messages through the app. disappearing message feature — even as the FTC was investigating Amazon.

“Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during the investigation prior to Plaintiffs' complaint, and Amazon did not instruct employees to retain Signal messages until more than fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs' investigation was underway,” the FTC wrote in the filing. .

^{Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images}

The FTC named Bezos, as well as other senior executives such as Amazon's top lawyer David Zapolsky, as some of the executives who used the Signal feature and its disappearing messages.

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The filing is part of a larger antitrust case that began in September when the FTC sued Amazonaccusing the retail giant of illegally maintaining a monopoly through anti-competitive practices.

Amazon he answered that the lawsuit could negatively affect both consumers who shop on its platform at higher prices and independent businesses that sell products through it.

In Thursday's filing, the FTC sought more information about how Amazon's leadership told employees to communicate on Signal, including when to use it and whether there were specific instructions for deleting messages.

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said Amazon spokesman Tim Doyle Bloomberg that the FTC's claims were “baseless” and that Amazon disclosed its signal use to the FTC “years ago.”

Doyle also said Business Insider that “the FTC has a complete picture of Amazon's decision-making in this case including 1.7 million documents from sources such as email, internal messaging apps and laptops (among other sources) and over 100 terabytes of data.”