Lauren Feiner

In a 2018 email, then-CEO Jack Dorsey responded to an employee question asking whether Twitter “should serve personal social network (conversation among acquaintances)” in addition to facilitating public conversations. Dorsey responded, “Yes, but we have to pick one to optimize for. There’s already a service out there that does personal network well, so let’s focus on our strength of interest network.” The FTC is trying to bolster its argument that Meta competes in a distinct market for personal social networking services, where users go to connect with friends and family.

Coleman says that just because X competes with everything from TV and screaming children for people’s attention, it’s not that useful to think of competition that way to improve a product. “It’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that,” he says. Once Jack Dorsey became CEO of Twitter, Coleman says, the company determined it was most useful for helping people follow the news and their interests.

The judge seems flummoxed by the platform’s reply feature. He asks what’s the point of responding to a tweet from a celebrity, like LeBron James. “He doesn’t care,” Boasberg says. Coleman says that part of what makes X special is that it’s “not uncommon for the public figures to reply back.”

We’re kicking off the third week of trial with X VP of Product Keith Coleman. He will help establish the relevant market that Meta competes in for this case. Coleman testifies that the core use case of X is talking about things that are happening in the world.

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.