The deception does not have to be believed to be a deception. Facebook explicitly lied to the EC: "When Facebook notified the acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014,

The deception does not have to be believed to be a deception. Facebook explicitly lied to the EC: "When Facebook notified the acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014, it informed the Commission that it would be unable to establish reliable automated matching between Facebook users' accounts and WhatsApp users' accounts." "The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility."