Lauren Feiner

A 2018 document lists the features that Meta integrated with Instagram, including cross-posting with Facebook, and explains how they impacted each app. The overall effect is described as increasing Instagram’s active users by millions each year, while the impact on Facebook was described as “neutral.” Systrom says Zuckerberg decided to cut these integrations that largely benefited Instagram.

The Meta CEO’s reaction to Instagram’s growth, as Facebook’s growth plateaued, stirred complex feelings in him, Systrom says. “My experience of him is that he was always very happy to have Instagram in the family,” he testifies. “But also, I think as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, meaning Instagram or Facebook, and I think there were real human emotional things going on there.”

Zuckerberg had mixed feelings about Instagram over the years, depending on how it was impacting engagement on Facebook, Systrom testifies. “Depending on the temperature of that feeling, we would get more investment or less investment.” Systrom believes that Zuckerberg “was not investing in Instagram” because he saw it as a threat to Facebook.

Meta dispatched a few members of its growth team to work with Instagram on growing after the acquisition, Systrom testifies. But then, he says, “I woke up one day and they were gone.” Systrom complained in a 2014 message to another Instagram executive that “no startup would simply pull growth people,” and he says on the stand that if Instagram were still independent, “the probability of that happening is very close to zero.”

Systrom says he received “zero” of the trust and safety headcount allocation Meta created after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and was instead told to work with Meta’s central team. “I felt that was not appropriate given the scale of Instagram,” he testifies. “To get zero of some of these major proclamation investments felt like there was something going on there.”

After the acquisition, Systrom says he informed his board that Twitter had decided to restrict access to part of its API, which allowed people to find their Twitter friends on Instagram. A Twitter executive “made it clear that this is in direct retaliation to Facebook cutting off the same API access to Twitter. I can only imagine Jack + Dick are also not very happy about the acquisition.”

Systrom recounts talks he had with each of these companies in 2011 and 2012. He says he had at least ten meetings with Twitter executives about their acquisition interest, including a “sushi dinner” with its then-CEO, Dick Costolo. Google seemed more coy, but Systrom suspected the company was also interested. Talks with Apple never really wrapped up neatly, he says.

He says he didn’t feel pressure to monetize right away because investors placed so much emphasis on growth to secure the strong network effects of a large user base. Even still, in early funding rounds, he pitched a mock-up of what advertising on Instagram could eventually look like, which he says is “exactly what you see when you open up Instagram today.”

Systrom testifies that the app managed to stay online before Meta bought it, and that he was already dealing with spam and problematic content filtering. He contrasts this with Twitter, which became known for its “fail whale” page when the service was down. This undermines Meta’s pro-competitive justifications for the deal, which argue that it improved Instagram for consumers by making it safer and more reliable.

Systrom confidently answers that building out video, messaging, and photo tagging features would have been entirely possible without Meta, and that he already had plans to pursue some of those features prior to the acquisition. “It was not necessarily difficult, and there were plenty of other companies that had functionalities similar to this,” he says. When Meta’s attorney objects that this is speculation, Judge Boasberg overrules him, saying, “I feel that in our but-for world discussion, it’s all going to be speculation.”