Olivan says “there was no signs of them morphing into anything else” besides a replacement for SMS messaging. Besides the founders’ distaste for social features, Olivan says that the way WhatsApp grew outside the US — through arbitrage of high international telecom SMS fees — didn’t exist in the US. He flatly testifies that Meta did not buy WhatsApp because it feared the app becoming a social network competitor.
Even though the 2018 data scandal led users to view Facebook’s brand more negatively, Olivan concedes it had a relatively lower impact on users actually deactivating their accounts. The FTC seems to be positioning this as a measure of Meta’s alleged monopoly power, since the ability to raise prices without losing customers is a common indicator of such power.
Facebook has at points worried about cannibalizing its flagship platform by promoting users moving to Instagram. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described this in his testimony as Meta depriving Instagram of resources to favor Facebook Blue. But Olivan says it’s okay for one side of the business to shrink a little if growth expands overall. “As long as this one grows much more, I’m willing to take a little hit on the other one,” he says.
I’m at Meta HQ for the company’s first-ever LlamaCon developer event, where CPO Chris Cox just announced the Llama API waitlist. It’s in “limited preview” for select partners with no pricing information yet, but the announcement still drew applause from the audience. Meta has been trying to make it easier for companies to use Llama, and this API feels like an important step in that direction.
[llama.developer.meta.com]
“Out of all the potential buyers, I thought Google and Apple would be the worst ones because they already ran the operating systems of the phones,” Olivan testifies. They were “particularly dangerous acquirers because they have an unfair advantage on us” by running the underlying operating system, he says.
Olivan describes a “huge chain of ifs” that might have led Google to becoming a significant social player in at least some countries around the world, had it acquired WhatsApp — something he and other Facebook execs feared in 2012. Two of those “ifs” would be if Google would run a social app without killing it, and whether it could convince WhatsApp’s founders to add social features, which they infamously resisted.
“The plan was to figure it out down the line,” Olivan testifies about the $19 billion acquisition. After all, he says. “Mark didn’t have a plan for how to monetize Facebook when he started it, either.”
In 2013, the company’s-then director of corporate development Amin Zoufonoun wrote that perhaps Facebook needs “a separate, free sms focused and branded messenger product to compete in this space if we cannot buy whatsapp. Zoufonoun worried “that FB messenger, with its legacy connotations may not do it in the space defined by whatsapp no matter what we do.” Olivan, who had recently taken over the Messenger team, advocated for improving the existing app, instead.
Even though Facebook closely tracked WhatsApp’s growth in 2012 and 2013 alongside other mobile messaging apps — some of which were adding social features — Olivan says they were not concerned about WhatsApp trying to become a social network. The app only aimed to be a replacement for SMS messaging in countries where telcos charged high rates for the service, Olivan testifies. Still, several documents show Facebook executives tracking WhatsApp’s growth with concern about how it stacked up to Facebook Messenger’s.
404 Media found that chatbots created by AI Studio — a custom AI character maker for Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp — will claim to have non-existent therapy qualifications, training, and license numbers when asked if they’re a real therapist. In one example, a therapy chatbot also said that discussions are “completely confidential,” and it’s unclear if these chats are truly private or moderated by Meta.
Olivan opposed letting competing messenger apps advertise on Facebook’s platform because he worried it was a bad tradeoff to a make a quick buck. He’s testified repeatedly he doesn’t like to help competitors, and wrote in a 2013 email that “we will look like complete idiots if we lose our business to these messenger services and help them along the way for a couple of $s.” He testifies he was “being a bit hyperbolic.”
Olivan testifies that he was “paranoid” as head of growth in 2012 about the expansion of mobile messaging apps into social apps, especially in countries where Facebook’s flagship app had less of a stronghold. In a 2012 message, Olivan told a colleague he worried that the shift to mobile combined with “messengers growing organically with huge retention and virality = potential recipe for not be around in a couple ... years from now.”
Olivan, who previously managed Facebook’s messaging efforts, asked staff in a 2012 email to “compile a ‘this shit is getting scary deck’ given all the data we have now” about the growth of messaging apps worldwide, which were also adding social features. Olivan wanted to circulate the deck to Facebook leadership “with a message: we really need to double down on messenger / our messenger is broken.”
Olivan is poking holes in the FTC’s market definition which relies on the way users come to Facebook and Instagram to connect with friends and family they know in real life. He says he’s actually been surprised to learn there’s some users who engage on Facebook without any connections at all — though he can’t say how many people that is.
