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.”
Their feud also blocked Instagram link previews in tweets until it was resolved over backyard pizza in 2021.
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.”
“The first slowdown that we had was maybe a year into being at Facebook,” Systrom testifies. The FTC is making the point that Instagram’s rise was unique and validated before the social media giant acquired it. After winning “App of the Year” from Apple, Systrom recalls that new registrations “skyrocketed.”
At launch, Systrom says the app’s growth was “exponential, unstoppable,” with 25,000 users registering in the first day. It was growing so quickly in the early days that, in his eyes, it didn’t even matter exactly how many active users were on the platform; he just had to keep up with the demand, he testifies.
We’re going all the way back to 2009, when Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger were working on a location check-in app called Burbn, which they later pivoted into the photo-sharing app Instagram. Systrom says Instagram’s October 2010 launch occurred as the Apple App Store was making it easier for developers to get started, and advances in smartphone cameras, particularly with the iPhone 4, had significantly improved photo quality.