More from FTC v. Meta: the antitrust battle over Instagram and WhatsApp

As the app grew early in the pandemic, Alison says, “we were very surprised by how much time people were spending on TikTok.” Meta found that number was roughly 120 minutes per user, per day.

When Matheson points out that Facebook still prompts users to log in or sign up to connect with friends, family, and people they know, Alison cautions that “just because something is on our website doesn’t mean that it’s completely up to date,” since they’re working to update how they describe the brand. He adds during cross-examination that “people are coming to Facebook for several other things besides friends” and it’s in the middle of an evolutions of how to describe the app.

Matheson describes at a high level a publicly-redacted experiment from a 2021 presentation. Facebook found the experiment increased the amount of original content users shared to their feeds, but time spent on the app went down. Matheson says this would be bad for Facebook because if users see all their friends’ posts and don’t come back, it can’t serve them as many ads. Alison says that the number of times a day users opened the app also declined, as did its “meaningful social interaction” score — so another interpretation is that users would miss content they care even more about, like that from a support group.

That’s how Boasberg interprets the new feature that consolidates friends’ posts into one feed. “This arguably could also enable you on the feed to diminish further the number of friend posts because to the extent people say, ‘hey, I want to see more friend posts,’ the answer is, ‘just go to the tab, it’s all there,” Boasberg says. “And then if in fact the demand is really for unconnected content, then this sort of lets you have your cake and eat it too.” Alison says the decline in friend content is mostly due to users posting less to their feed, not Facebook’s own decisions.

Alison describes it as “a nice feature” for Facebook users who want it but no longer the “main character.”

That’s why Facebook created the friends tab to consolidate posts from users’ connections in one place. As Facebook now recommends more posts and videos from content creators and other accounts users aren’t connected with, Alison says that if a user really wanted to see every post from their friends in the regular feed, “you might have to scroll through 10,000 posts,” even if there’s only 10-20 new friend posts to see.

Facebook recently introduced a friends tab to try to recreate the feeling of scrolling your News Feed circa 2006. Alison says they think “there are some features from the very early days of Facebook and social networking that could become more interesting again” as apps including Facebook move toward public, algorithmically-recommended content. He describes it as an “experiment or a bet that we’re making to almost bring a little bit of nostalgia to Facebook as the core experience goes away from friends.”

In an interview published in October 2022, Alison told Wired’s Steven Levy that “Facebook is still at its core about friends and family.” But Alison testifies that if he were to redo the interview today, “I would acknowledge that there are a large number of people who are not using Facebook to connect with friends and family.” He adds that the world has changed so much that “we are seeing that not to be as true today as it felt two and half years ago when this interview took place.”

This was true even as the app built out its discovery engine, which powers algorithmic recommendations of content from users who are connected with one another, Alison testifies. The FTC is using Alison’s testimony to establish that in the past few years and through today, a sizable number of users still come to Facebook to connect with their friends, and the company recognizes this even as it expands into other use cases. Still, Alison says, Facebook now thinks about facilitating connections as inclusive of people users don’t know in real life, including content creators.

Not everyone who joins Facebook these days does so to find their friends on the service, Alison says. He testifies there’s a “growing” number of people who join the app with no friends, and don’t see any friend content on the app. Meta has argued that connecting with friends is an increasingly smaller portion of what users come to its apps for. The FTC says that as an absolute number, there’s still a sizable number of users who do want to connect with friends, and Facebook and Instagram are virtually the only games in town.

Alison downplays how much users care about connecting with their Facebook friends versus other potential connections, like content creators. “I have friends I haven’t seen in 30 years or I met once at a party that I don’t care about,” he says.

It’s not enough to look at what users say they want from Facebook, Alison says, you also have to look at what their actions tell you about what they want. Just because users say in surveys they want to see more friend content, doesn’t mean that’s how it plays out. “When people actually got more friend content on Facebook they visited Facebook less,” he testifies.

Alison is expected to be one of the FTC’s last major witnesses in its case-in-chief. The FTC’s lead attorney Dan Matheson is driving home the point that Meta knows that people want to see posts from their friends when they come to Facebook, by looking at a 2021 internal presentation where it found in a survey that “3 of the 4 top user pain points were related to friend content.”

During redirect, Hemphill testifies that some of the points Hansen made about his analysis weren’t relevant to his findings of Meta’s alleged anticompetitive behavior. He counter’s Hansen’s charge that he thinks he knows better than the business people at Meta. “They’ve got their expertise and I’ve got mine,” he says.

Hemphill clarifies that he did disclose to Meta during his deposition over a year ago that he and former Biden official Tim Wu had a “conversation” with the FTC in 2019 about investigating Meta, but the company never asked him for a copy of the presentation. He says he wasn’t compensated for it, and wasn’t retained by the FTC for another two and a half years — during which he also didn’t lobby the regulator to bring a case. He says that public reporting of Meta’s conduct “seemed like the kind of thing that we’d been worried about in our academic work,” but that he hadn’t formed a view at the time that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive.

Back to friendlier-questioning from the FTC, Hemphill says that while ad quality might be improving, Meta is behaving like a monopolist in what it chooses to do with those quality gains. In a more competitive environment, Hemphill says, Meta would pass on those gains to consumers by letting them enjoy the same amount of ads, but at a higher quality. Instead, he says, Meta dials up the knob to show them more ads.

This is how Hansen closes what’s been a tense cross-examination of Hemphill. Meta has used the exam to try to discredit the FTC’s key economic expert, and Hansen reiterates that Hemphill had “preconceived” notions about the case, calling back to the 2019 “roadshow” he participated in to convince regulators to investigate Meta. Hemphill has been on the stand since Monday afternoon, and the FTC attorney Krisha Cerilli is back for redirect questioning.

This is what Hansen asks the FTC expert after showing a chart that shows younger cohorts spend a higher percentage of time on the platform engaging with friends than older cohorts, yet they get served fewer ads — seemingly contrary to Hemphill’s claim that Meta taxes users who enjoy friend sharing more. Hemphill says the point is “apples and oranges” and that the older cohort makes up 60 to 70 percent of the user base getting higher ad loads. That prompts Hansen to ask whether he thinks Meta discriminates against such a large portion of its users, and Hemphill says it’s “a standard understanding of price discrimination.”

Hemphill doesn’t cite any documents or testimony that directly say Meta engages in this kind of behavior by showing these users more ads. Hansen says. Hemphill responds that his conclusion comes from the evidence of price discrimination in how Meta chooses to serve ads to different users, recognizing which are more or less engaged with their services. But, he acknowledges, “I’m not aware of a single document that connects the dots in that exact way.”

Hansen accuses Hemphill of altering the axis on charts showing user sentiment about Meta, calling it “misleading to crop the axis to magnify changes that aren’t changes.” When Hemphill describes the sentiment metrics as in “clear decline,” Hansen shoots back, “there’s no decline. It’s flat. Flat as a pancake.”

If users don’t want to see an ad, they can scroll past it in “a second or less,” Meta’s Hansen says. Hemphill agrees that “not every ad is burdensome” and users can gain value from some of them, but on the whole they are a burdensome part of the social media experience for users. Hemphill adds that he hasn’t “made a study of scroll time, though I agree that scrolling past an ad does not take long.”

Hansen charges that Hemphill’s conclusions would mean Meta would need to pay consumers to use its services in order to make it any cheaper than it already is — free. Hemphill has testified that under a more competitive social media market, there would be a greater “surplus” for consumers. Hemphill says Meta wouldn’t necessarily have to pay users in cold hard cash. Alternatively, it could offer them some other kind of reward they’d consider valuable.

Meta’s lead attorney Mark Hansen is continuing cross-examination of the FTC’s economic expert Scott Hemphill this morning. Hansen brings up this incident that Meta has repeatedly come back to at trial to show that TikTok users see Facebook and Instagram as reasonable alternatives, even though the government says they don’t compete for the same market Meta dominates. He says Facebook saw 20 percent of diverted usage from TikTok during its January 2025 outage, and Instagram, 17 percent.

During cross-examination, we’ve been looking at a 2019 deck the former Biden official, Facebook co-founder, and the FTC’s now-expert Scott Hemphill pitched to regulators, describing why they should investigate the company on antitrust grounds, based on public reporting and data. Meta attorney Mark Hansen says the FTC nor Hemphill produced the slides to them, so it’s not clear where they came from, and when they change slides, we can see they’re from a photo of a phone, where someone’s finger is visible.