The company has been hammered by legislators and parents for how it sucks users into its services, but Zuckerberg says Meta focuses on creating valuable experiences, rather than making sure users stay engaged for as long as possible.
“I don’t want the team to just say, ‘oh this variant of the algorithm, people spend 20 seconds more in, so we’ll ship this,’” he says.
FTC attorney Daniel Matheson just passed Zuckerberg as a witness. Zuckerberg has been on the stand for roughly eight hours so far between today and yesterday. Now it’s Meta’s lead attorney Mark Hansen’s turn to question the CEO.
But he’s not giving them much to work with. The government wants to show that Meta dominates a distinct market of social apps for connecting with family and friends that only includes Snapchat and MeWe, a crucial element of proving its case.
Zuckerberg says that apps like TikTok might not explicitly market themselves that way, but “they’ve certainly taken steps” to promote friend connections by doing things like prompting users to import contacts.
He seems resistant to the idea that the professional social network is all that different from his own offerings nowadays. The FTC argues that the market Meta dominates is primarily about sharing content with family and friends, which would exclude services like LinkedIn and Nextdoor that market themselves for more specialized functions. According to Zuckerberg, “all of these are quite a bit more competitive” with Meta’s apps.
Zuckerberg revealed this after the FTC attorney prodded him about whether people come to Facebook or Instagram just to look at ads. “You’ve never chosen to offer a feed of just ads,” the FTC’s Daniel Matheson says. “I think we’ve discussed it at one point,” Zuckerberg responds.
While the FTC has tried to frame Meta stuffing its apps with ads as a consumer harm, Zuckerberg contends that the company’s users enjoy them. Over time, he says, people tell the company that the quality of ads “has basically approached the quality of the organic content.”
With the rapid growth of Snapchat Stories, Zuckerberg told his team in 2014: “We need to take this new dynamic seriously -- both as a competitive risk and as a product opportunity to add functionality that many people clearly love and want to use daily.” Because of Stories, he wrote, “Snapchat is now more of a competitor for Instagram and News Feed than it ever was for messaging.”
The Meta CEO says that the way they were able to grow Instagram post-acquisition gave him confidence he could do the same for other apps, like Snapchat. In 2013, he told his team about an offer to buy the app that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel ultimately rejected.
“For what it’s worth, I think if we had bought them, we probably would have accelerated their growth,” Zuckerberg testifies. “But that’s obviously a speculation.”
The FTC is presenting documents from 2013 in which Zuckerberg and another executive, Javier Olivan, discussed messaging app competitors and what they’d need to do to keep up. Olivan wrote that he had spent “sleepless nights” worrying about WhatsApp’s growth and warns that “it might be now or never” to improve Meta’s services, given how fast these guys keep growing / the ambitions they are signaling.