What users say they want and what they show they want through their actions can be two different things. Cobb illustrates this point with the example of chronological feeds. While users repeatedly report this as a feature they’d like, Cobb says every time the company has tested it, satisfaction with the app declines and users’ engagement changes.
But that dip soon recovered, Cobb testifies. He’s referencing the sweeping content moderation and fact-checking policy changes CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January just ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which answered a Republican wish-list.
Dips in how users feel about Meta’s brand are often correlated to media coverage — not necessarily actual changes to the product, Meta research executive Curtiss Cobb testifies on cross-examination. The FTC had tried to frame the fact that users don’t leave the apps in droves after reporting feeling worse about Meta’s brand shows they’re locked in due to Meta’s alleged monopoly. Meta is trying to complicate this picture, by showing that just because users feel worse about the brand after a specific media event doesn’t mean that its products are getting any worse — and that might be reason enough to stay.
Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) removed a provision from a budget package that would have stripped antitrust enforcement authority from the consumer protection agency and transferred it over to the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The language appeared in an earlier version of the package and has long been on Republicans’ wishlist. President Donald Trump has fired the panel’s two Democratic minority commissioners shortly before the agency went to court over its lawsuit against Meta’s alleged social media monopoly.
A June 2019 document says that the data privacy scandal “is the most likely significant event that would have had a negative impact on both revenue and engagement.” But even so, Meta’s research team found, “we failed to detect significant and consistent effects of sentiment (or adverse events) on these metrics.” Cobb quibbled with how the FTC’s attorney restated the finding back to him, and Boasberg noticeably leaned back in his chair and rolled his eyes after a repeated back-and-forth, before ending the proceedings for the day.
In 2018, Meta found that a majority of Facebook users came to the platform for this reason. A document from the time describes “Facebook’s core value proposition” as “robustly anchored on ‘keeping up with friends and family,’” which is exactly the trait the FTC says is unique to personal social networking services. Cobb makes a point of saying that this was true at the time, seven years ago.
Meta VP of Research Curtiss Cobb, who tracks how users feel about the brand, just took the stand. His team surveys Facebook and Instagram users about how they feel about whether the company cares about its users. In 2020, for example, the team found that “in the US this year Facebook has slid to the 21st place and falls behind all other tech companies we measured” in the metric it calls “Relative Cares About Users” or RCAU.
Drawing on filings in TikTok’s litigation against a US ban, Meta points out that TikTok has said it could take years to perform the maintenance needed to keep a US-only app running if it were separated from ByteDance. TikTok also said that reconfiguring its content moderation systems for a US-only app would reach unsustainable costs, despite serving a platform of 170 million US users. Meta is drawing a comparison to how it believes it was uniquely positioned to help Instagram with its infrastructure and content moderation because of its own scale and success.
Meta is asking about statements TikTok made in its lawsuit against the US ban of its app to show that when TikTok is unavailable, users often turn to Instagram — showing that users consider it to be a substitute in at least some respect. TikTok told the court in its own case that even a temporary shutdown could cause it to permanently cede ground to competitors like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. Earlier in the Meta trial, the company showed that TikTok’s temporary shutdown led to a spike in engagement for Instagram.
