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

Dips in how users feel about Meta’s brand are often correlated to media coverage — not necessarily actual changes to the product, Meta research executive Curtiss Cobb testifies on cross-examination. The FTC had tried to frame the fact that users don’t leave the apps in droves after reporting feeling worse about Meta’s brand shows they’re locked in due to Meta’s alleged monopoly. Meta is trying to complicate this picture, by showing that just because users feel worse about the brand after a specific media event doesn’t mean that its products are getting any worse — and that might be reason enough to stay.

Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) removed a provision from a budget package that would have stripped antitrust enforcement authority from the consumer protection agency and transferred it over to the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The language appeared in an earlier version of the package and has long been on Republicans’ wishlist. President Donald Trump has fired the panel’s two Democratic minority commissioners shortly before the agency went to court over its lawsuit against Meta’s alleged social media monopoly.

A June 2019 document says that the data privacy scandal “is the most likely significant event that would have had a negative impact on both revenue and engagement.” But even so, Meta’s research team found, “we failed to detect significant and consistent effects of sentiment (or adverse events) on these metrics.” Cobb quibbled with how the FTC’s attorney restated the finding back to him, and Boasberg noticeably leaned back in his chair and rolled his eyes after a repeated back-and-forth, before ending the proceedings for the day.

In 2018, Meta found that a majority of Facebook users came to the platform for this reason. A document from the time describes “Facebook’s core value proposition” as “robustly anchored on ‘keeping up with friends and family,’” which is exactly the trait the FTC says is unique to personal social networking services. Cobb makes a point of saying that this was true at the time, seven years ago.

Meta VP of Research Curtiss Cobb, who tracks how users feel about the brand, just took the stand. His team surveys Facebook and Instagram users about how they feel about whether the company cares about its users. In 2020, for example, the team found that “in the US this year Facebook has slid to the 21st place and falls behind all other tech companies we measured” in the metric it calls “Relative Cares About Users” or RCAU.

Drawing on filings in TikTok’s litigation against a US ban, Meta points out that TikTok has said it could take years to perform the maintenance needed to keep a US-only app running if it were separated from ByteDance. TikTok also said that reconfiguring its content moderation systems for a US-only app would reach unsustainable costs, despite serving a platform of 170 million US users. Meta is drawing a comparison to how it believes it was uniquely positioned to help Instagram with its infrastructure and content moderation because of its own scale and success.

Meta is asking about statements TikTok made in its lawsuit against the US ban of its app to show that when TikTok is unavailable, users often turn to Instagram — showing that users consider it to be a substitute in at least some respect. TikTok told the court in its own case that even a temporary shutdown could cause it to permanently cede ground to competitors like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat. Earlier in the Meta trial, the company showed that TikTok’s temporary shutdown led to a spike in engagement for Instagram.

In a 2022 document presented to TikTok’s leadership, the company wrote that Instagram would likely make Reels its “no. 1 format.” TikTok predicted, “Instagram will redesign the interface and consolidate everything to Reels to make the short-form video first.”

Presser is reluctant to say so straightforwardly, testifying that’s not exactly how he thinks about it. But Meta’s attorney shows him a 2021 internal document where TikTok wrote, “YouTube and Instagram are TikTok’s most important competitors.”

Meta is trying to muddy Presser’s testimony about the distinctions between TikTok and Instagram by pulling up a filing TikTok made with an Australian regulator, arguing against an age restriction exemption for YouTube. “Today, TikTok, Reels and Shorts are virtually — and deliberately — indistinguishable in function and user experience,” the company wrote in March. Presser reiterates that while their features are very similar, the experience of the content on each app is different.

Presser says that only a “very minuscule” percentage of time spent on TikTok is in the friends tab — just about 1 percent. They keep it around in hopes that eventually it will help enhance users’ experiences, he says. Similarly, only a small percentage of users upload their contact lists from their address book or from Instagram and Facebook, he says, reinforcing the FTC’s argument that users don’t really go to TikTok to connect with their real-life connections.

The FTC brought up a declaration from TikTok in its own case against the US government over the law that seeks to ban the app unless it’s sold from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. The government used the declaration to show how TikTok described itself as offering a distinct service from other social platforms available in the US. It’s a reminder of the deeply strange context behind this case and Presser’s appearance today in the same courthouse where the TikTok ban law was litigated (and upheld).

Looking at a screenshot of the same video experience on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts that Meta has shown throughout trial to show the similarity between the products, Presser says the snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. “When you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” Presser says, which for Instagram, is its feed of content and stories. Plus, he says, “as you swipe on any of these platforms, the mix of content that you would get might feel different” because of the different recommendation algorithms.

Presser says the video app doesn’t offer this kind of service, reinforcing the FTC’s view that TikTok operates in a market distinct from the one it claims Meta monopolizes — which focuses on connecting users with friends and family, rather that surfacing content based on users’ interests. Presser’s testimony is significant for the FTC, in part because ByteDance’s submission to European regulators in 2020 uses the term “personal social networking” to define Facebook and Instagram, which Meta has tried to paint as a made-up label.

It’s now TikTok’s turn to explain why it does (or doesn’t) compete with Facebook and Instagram for a social network connecting friends and family. Adam Presser, who leads operations and trust and safety, is walking through a submission by TikTok’s owner ByteDance to the European Commission, where it distinguishes between social networking services like Meta’s apps and “online content creation and sharing services,” which are focused around sharing and consuming content based on interests.

Meta is trying to draw an analogy between Yahoo’s $1 billion acquisition of Tumblr in 2013 with Meta’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram for the same price. Tumblr wasn’t making a profit when it was acquired but had a large user base. A big difference, of course, is the trajectory of each startup. When Meta’s attorney asks if Tumblr’s subsequent sale to Automattic was “significantly less” than $10 million, Tucker says, “I saw a joke that it was near the price of a modest home in Silicon Valley.”

Eli Tucker is walking the court through the blogging platform, including its app store listing that describes it with the words, “Fandom, Art, Chaos.” Just like the FTC did with Pinterest, Strava, and Reddit, the government is trying to show Judge Boasberg that the way these other platforms are designed and used are more about connecting over interests than with friends — and therefore outside of the market Meta allegedly monopolizes.

Meta is pointing out on cross-examination that Apple has chosen to list its own messaging app in this category on the App Store, suggesting there may be more overlap with Meta’s services than the FTC would argue.

Shah testifies that would probably be “distracting” for users who just want to focus on their conversations with friends.

In a screenshot of an example group chat, “Momma Chloe” asks this — presumably because she doesn’t have most of the messengers’ numbers. The FTC is making the point that iMessage users don’t have profiles that automatically populate if a user doesn’t already have someone else’s info — making it different from the social apps Meta runs. It’s a bit of a painstaking line of questioning for anyone who already uses iMessage regularly, but it’s driving home the point but the app is distinct from a personal social networking app.

Ronak Shah, director of product management who oversees services like iMessage and Safari as well as user privacy and security, is now testifying remotely. We’ll likely hear more about the messaging space that WhatsApp competes in.

The company invested extra to make sure it’s infrastructure wouldn’t melt down if TikTok were suddenly to go dark in the US after the ban took effect. Meta feared that “the flood in traffic of all those users coming to Reels … could potentially overwhelm our data centers to the point that our site would go down,” Olivan testifies. The company was already aware that Reels usage is higher in India, for example, where TikTok is banned.

All social network apps have to do to figure out who their users are connected with is ask for permission to read the address book on their phones, Olivan says, which is something most do when users first join an app. This pushes back on the FTC’s theory about the importance of network effects to Meta’s dominance — meaning that the more users are on a platform, the more value it has to those users.

Rather than stifle Instagram, Olivan testifies that Meta wanted the app to thrive after it acquired it. In a 2012 email after the acquisition was announced, Olivan said the startup founders were “barely being able to keep the site up & running” because of the influx of sign-ups. He suggested helping the app with translations and analytics that would help it grow, using existing frameworks that Facebook had already used.