The court is hearing from FTC expert Kevin Hearle and is also expected to hear from Discord’s Julia Tang. I’m back in the Google courtroom today following testimony DuckDuckGo’s CEO and executives from Microsoft and Yahoo’s search businesses. There’s no court on Fridays in the Meta case, but we’ll bring you live updates from this case again next week.
I’m running upstairs to a different courthouse media room to follow the Google search remedies case. In that trial, Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko just took the stand. We’ll set this stream live again when there’s more to share from the Meta trial.
That’s what we’re hearing from the FTC’s expert witness, Professor Cliff Lampe, an expert on human-computer interaction. He’s affirming the FTC’s view that the way people use and see apps like Instagram and Facebook is different from how they use and view other apps like TikTok or Pinterest.
Stoop says the goal of the project had been to make uploading multiple photos to Facebook faster and more fun, and that it achieved that. After Facebook had finished a major technical overhaul of its iOS app, it just made more sense to integrate the features with the main app where users already existed, he says.
That’s how Meta is trying to frame the product on cross-examination. Stoop says the two had different distribution models and audiences, since Facebook didn’t have a public following feature at the time and was more focused on sharing photos with friends, while Instagram lets users follow people they didn’t know. He adds that Facebook continued the project after the Instagram acquisition, and his team grew from about 10-15 people to about 40-50 over two years.
An internal May 2012 document discussing how to discuss the launch of Facebook Camera lists key external “messages to avoid.” The first was, “Facebook Camera launches filters, like Instagram,” and the second was “Facebook squashes competition.” Stoop says they wanted to make sure the press wouldn’t pigeonhole the product and miss the bigger picture.
The FTC is attempting to demonstrate that Meta viewed its Facebook Camera app as a competitor to Instagram, and that until the deal to acquire Instagram, it was actively working to address its issues and release it. In notes to his team in January 2012 from what Stoop says is known within Meta as a “Zuck Review,” Stoop summarized Zuckerberg’s feedback. “Instagram is growing quickly,” he wrote, so getting Facebook Camera “out the door fast is a huge priority.”
