Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, April 15, 2025. Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram into a separate company in 2018 as he increasingly became concerned that the photo and video app's success was hurting the Facebook social network. Photographer: Allison Robbert/Bloomberg via Getty Images
At monopoly trial, Zuckerberg redefined social media as texting with friends – Ars Technica
2025-04-17T21:56:53Z
Mark Zuckerberg played up TikTok rivalry at monopoly trial, but judge may not buy it.
The Meta monopoly trial has raised a question that Meta hopes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can’t effectively answer: How important is it to use social media to connect with friends and family today?
Connecting with friends was, of course, Facebook’s primary use case as it became the rare social network to hit 1 billion users—not by being acquired by a Big Tech company but based on the strength of its clean interface and the network effects that kept users locked in simply because all the important people in their life chose to be there.
According to the FTC, Meta took advantage of Facebook’s early popularity, and it has since bought out rivals and otherwise cornered the market on personal social networks. Only Snapchat and MeWe (a privacy-focused Facebook alternative) are competitors to Meta platforms, the FTC argues, and social networks like TikTok or YouTube aren’t interchangeable, because those aren’t destinations focused on connecting friends and family.
For Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, however, those early days of Facebook bringing old friends back together are apparently over. He took the stand this week to testify that the FTC’s market definition ignores the reality that Meta contends with today, where “the amount that people are sharing with friends on Facebook, especially, has been declining,” CNN reported.
“Even the amount of new friends that people add … I think has been declining,” Zuckerberg said, although he did not indicate how steep the decline is. “I don’t know the exact numbers,” Zuckerberg admitted. Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, also took the stand and reportedly testified that while she was at Meta, “friends and family sharing went way down over time . . . If you have a strategy of targeting friends and family, you’d have serious revenue issues.”
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