The FTC is showing Sandberg a 2018 board presentation from soon after the news of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal broke. Despite a decline in the perceptions users had of Facebook, the company reported to its board that there had been “no visible impact to core engagement metrics” globally or in the US to metrics like time spent.
That’s how Sandberg remembers the discussions leading up to the acquisition. She also acknowledges that Facebook eventually ended its own photos app project after acquiring Instagram.
In a 2011 email, Sandberg told colleagues that Google’s social network meant that “for the first time, we have real competition and consumers have real choice.” She wrote that it would mean “will have to be better to win, our margins may go down over time, we will no longer be able to make as many mistakes and hold onto our core users.” Sandberg testifies she was concerned because Google “created almost an exact replica” of Facebook.
She’s the second witness in the case, and will likely be here for several hours.
The CEO spent around 13 hours testifying over the past three days and he’s finally finished. We heard about his wild ideas for Meta throughout the years, as well as how he views the social media market, and his mindset leading up to his consequential acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, the central focus of the case.
The CEO testifies that it was reasonable for him to take a more assertive role in scaling advertising on Instagram several years post-acquisition. Early on, he says, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom “wanted to personally approve every ad that went on Instagram himself.” And while Zuckerberg was initially “happy to oblige,” he says it later made sense to make the app bear more responsibility for generating revenue.
That’s what Zuckerberg tells the FTC attorney who’s questioning him now. Zuckerberg says he didn’t want to deal with the complexity of “any connection that they had to China.” Musical.ly went on to be acquired by China-based ByteDance, was rebranded to TikTok, and grew into a major Meta competitor, he says.
One of WhatsApp’s founders used Craigslist as an example of his ambitions for the messaging service, Zuckerberg testifies, calling the site a “lifestyle company.” And rather than buying WhatsApp to prevent its growth, Zuckerberg says he had to convince its founders to add social features post-acquisition. This cuts against the FTC’s theory that WhatsApp might have grown to challenge Meta’s dominance had it remained independent or under different ownership.
Zuckerberg considered that WhatsApp could pivot its messaging platform into a “formidable competitor” to Facebook until he got to know its founders. “It became completely clear” they would never add the kind of features necessary to do that, he testifies, because they actually “looked down” on such things. “It’s hard to really express the kind of disdain that they had” for what other messaging apps were doing at the time, he says.
But he points out that the largest platforms today have had the backing of larger companies with massive infrastructure, like Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok. “Could I say it would have been impossible for them to do it without us? Obviously not. I mean, we did it,” he says. “But does it seem like it would have been likely?” Definitely not, he says.