Lauren Feiner

The judge opted to watch video testimony slated for the day in his chambers, so we’re done for the day. We’ll go live again this week when the trial continues.

A 2014 chat log between Systrom and Deng seems to undercut Deng’s testimony that he doesn’t recall Meta scaling back growth resources for Instagram. Deng says he doesn’t have enough context to confirm what he and Systrom were discussing, but described the chat as a “knee-jerk reaction” to an email they mentioned at the time. “Am I reading correctly we now have less growth support, not more?” Systrom asked. “This isn’t great for us,” Deng wrote at the time.

Deng, who moved to Instagram in 2013 until 2015 after working on Facebook Messenger, is challenging Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom’s testimony that the app could have reached the same success without Meta and that the company deprived it of resources. Deng says Meta helped Instagram with speeding up high quality hiring, and sharing infrastructure and growth team staff. Still, Deng left Instagram several years before Systrom departed the company.

Deng, who led product for Facebook’s messenger product in the early 2010s, says he was not worried about WhatsApp growing into a big rival in the US. Since many people in the US had iPhones where they could send mobile messages including photos through iMessage, he says, “people just expected more here than just text messaging,” which was the focus of the simple WhatsApp service. “There’s nothing about what they did that signaled they remotely wanted to get into more expressive messaging.” he says.

Former product executive Peter Deng warned colleagues about the existential threat of mobile messaging apps moving into Facebook’s core space. In an October 2012 email, he called messaging rivals “the biggest threat to our product that I’ve ever seen in my 5 years here at Facebook; it’s bigger than G+, and we’re all terrified,” he wrote, referring to Google’s now-defunct social media competitor. “These guys actually have a credible strategy: start with the most intimate social graph (i.e. The ones you message on mobile), and build from there.” Deng testifies he was referring to the three mobile apps that had started adding such features, and not the one Facebook ultimately acquired: WhatsApp.

Former TikTok director of UX research Eric Morrison testifies in a short video deposition that as of 2022, unlike Facebook and Instagram, TikTok “was not necessarily serving that need to connect to people that you already know.” This is the need that the FTC says Facebook and Instagram uniquely fill, alongside the smaller apps Snapchat and MeWe.

Hegeman concedes that even with TikTok becoming a more significant competitor in the past two years, Facebook’s user base and the time users spend on it have continued to grow.

Hegeman says that the (not publicly disclosed) number of users who opted out of off-app tracking through Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy mostly reflects Apple’s scare tactics in framing the question to users, rather than whether users actually prefer not to share their data with Meta. He adds that Apple frames the ask very differently when asking users about similar opt-ins for its own products. “I think it’s a clear example of them trying to leverage their position controlling the iOS operating system to advantage their position in the market,” he says.

Sometime after 2018, Meta realized that focusing on surfacing friends and family content wasn’t helping it as much as it had hoped. Competitors like TikTok were taking over a lot of time users would spend online, and Hegeman says Meta found it to be a better strategy to broaden the focus of the Facebook app to include investments in video and other kinds of content.