Dirk Stoop is the first witness of the day. He’s testifying about his role in leading development for the Facebook Camera app, which was ultimately shut down after the company’s acquisition of Instagram.
While testifying in the FTC v. Meta trial, Kevin Systrom described a contentious relationship with Mark Zuckerberg.
After a full day of testimony in the FTC v. Meta trial, which was largely positive for the government, the Instagram co-founder has left the witness stand. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Dirk Stoop, a former Facebook product manager who worked on the company’s early standalone camera app, as well as one of the FTC’s expert witnesses.
While Meta ultimately created a centralized integrity team to support Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Systrom says that his app required its own team to address issues that wouldn’t otherwise receive support from Meta. He compares this to how Meta removed his access to its central growth team, prompting Instagram to establish its own.
Wasn’t joining Meta exactly what the Instagram app needed as an accelerator? Systrom responds to that question by saying that’s not exactly what happened. Sure, some things Meta did helped Instagram grow more quickly, but there were also “parts that were more challenging that didn’t get fulfilled. It was a mixed bag.” Systrom later concedes that working with Meta’s growth team was great “if you could work with them,” which calls back to his earlier testimony that Zuckerberg at one point pulled that staff off Instagram.
But Systrom concedes it’s not zero. He continues to give Meta’s attorney a hard time by firmly resisting attempts to get him to admit that he’s merely speculating about his prediction that Instagram would have been big on its own. “You deal in a world of probabilities,” Systrom says. “You can never be sure.”
Instagram has since “generated many multiples of that price and then some,” Systrom says, adding that, “the number of people at Facebook who said, ‘I don’t know where we’d be without you,’ was many.” He dryly gives Zuckerberg some credit: “Sometimes you make a bet and it turns out well, and I think Mark did that.”
In another tense exchange between Huff and Systrom, the Meta attorney presents a 2012 email Systrom sent Zuckerberg before the acquisition. Systrom wrote that the photos people post on Instagram rather than Facebook are quite actually different, describing the photos on Instagram as “not social photos” but rather photos of the world. On the stand, Systrom calls this a “negotiation tactic,” and says, “that was probably less true than I was leading on.” When Huff calls it misleading, Systrom says, “I think it is okay to play your hand a certain way.”
Meta attorney Kevin Huff suggests that Instagram benefited largely from cross-posting to Facebook prior to the acquisition, but Systrom says it mostly cut the other way. “We helped Facebook make their app more engaging by posting photos over to them,” he says. After Huff shows him a 2012 email Systrom sent to Zuckerberg crediting Facebook cross-posting for Instagram’s success, he asks if Systrom was lying to Zuckerberg at the time. Systrom answers with a stern look and a single word: “Sir.”
He is now being questioned by Meta’s attorney and says that “network effects make it very difficult to displace large incumbents, including Instagram.” The question for Systrom is “how big” rivals like Snapchat and TikTok “could have gotten” absent Meta’s network effects, which disincentivize people from leaving a service that many of their friends are already on.