SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) began cutting off access to user data for app developers from 2012 to squash potential rivals while presenting the move to the general public as a boon for user privacy, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters.

FILE PHOTO: Stickers bearing the Facebook logo are pictured at Facebook Inc's F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, U.S., April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo
Some executives at the world’s biggest social network appeared to refer to the strategy of promoting a privacy-focused explanation for the change as the “Switcharoo Plan,” internal emails included in sealed California court filings show.

The emergence of nearly 7,000 pages of company emails and executive documents comes as Facebook faces multiple investigations into possible antitrust violations by regulators around the world.

The emails could supply valuable evidence to investigators, including a U.S. House of Representatives panel that sought company records in September on Facebook’s decisions to bar apps from its social graph, which maps out relations between users.

The documents come from a lawsuit filed in 2015 by Six4Three, the developer of a now-shuttered bikini photo app that lost access to Facebook user data as a result of the changes, which were announced in 2014 and implemented the following year.

Six4Three alleges that Facebook’s data policies were anticompetitive and that the company misrepresented those policies both to developers and the public.

Facebook has described the case as baseless