Lauren Feiner

University of Chicago professor John List, who previously served as chief economist at Uber and Lyft, is now on the stand to try to dismantle the FTC’s market definition of personal social networking services, and dispute its claim that “friends and family sharing” is a core use case for Facebook and Instagram. He tells the court that MeWe, a small competitor in the market Meta allegedly monopolizes, is “economically inconsequential.”

Alison testifies that he’s concerned about short-form video content being “commoditized,” since creators can post across many different apps. Still, he sees building Reels as a huge engineering undertaking and investment that was existential for the future of the business.“If we didn’t invest in Reels, then long term, our entire business was probably going to go down significantly,” he says. “We were really believing that this was going to be the future of our business.”

As the app grew early in the pandemic, Alison says, “we were very surprised by how much time people were spending on TikTok.” Meta found that number was roughly 120 minutes per user, per day.

When Matheson points out that Facebook still prompts users to log in or sign up to connect with friends, family, and people they know, Alison cautions that “just because something is on our website doesn’t mean that it’s completely up to date,” since they’re working to update how they describe the brand. He adds during cross-examination that “people are coming to Facebook for several other things besides friends” and it’s in the middle of an evolutions of how to describe the app.

Matheson describes at a high level a publicly-redacted experiment from a 2021 presentation. Facebook found the experiment increased the amount of original content users shared to their feeds, but time spent on the app went down. Matheson says this would be bad for Facebook because if users see all their friends’ posts and don’t come back, it can’t serve them as many ads. Alison says that the number of times a day users opened the app also declined, as did its “meaningful social interaction” score — so another interpretation is that users would miss content they care even more about, like that from a support group.

That’s how Boasberg interprets the new feature that consolidates friends’ posts into one feed. “This arguably could also enable you on the feed to diminish further the number of friend posts because to the extent people say, ‘hey, I want to see more friend posts,’ the answer is, ‘just go to the tab, it’s all there,” Boasberg says. “And then if in fact the demand is really for unconnected content, then this sort of lets you have your cake and eat it too.” Alison says the decline in friend content is mostly due to users posting less to their feed, not Facebook’s own decisions.

Alison describes it as “a nice feature” for Facebook users who want it but no longer the “main character.”

That’s why Facebook created the friends tab to consolidate posts from users’ connections in one place. As Facebook now recommends more posts and videos from content creators and other accounts users aren’t connected with, Alison says that if a user really wanted to see every post from their friends in the regular feed, “you might have to scroll through 10,000 posts,” even if there’s only 10-20 new friend posts to see.

Facebook recently introduced a friends tab to try to recreate the feeling of scrolling your News Feed circa 2006. Alison says they think “there are some features from the very early days of Facebook and social networking that could become more interesting again” as apps including Facebook move toward public, algorithmically-recommended content. He describes it as an “experiment or a bet that we’re making to almost bring a little bit of nostalgia to Facebook as the core experience goes away from friends.”

In an interview published in October 2022, Alison told Wired’s Steven Levy that “Facebook is still at its core about friends and family.” But Alison testifies that if he were to redo the interview today, “I would acknowledge that there are a large number of people who are not using Facebook to connect with friends and family.” He adds that the world has changed so much that “we are seeing that not to be as true today as it felt two and half years ago when this interview took place.”