Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to squirm in the hot seat last month when he finally appeared in court as his firm faced a years-long trial on accusations of being monopolistic.
Aside from the quaintness of being referred to as a “personal social network” (which shows you how long this challenge has been in the works), the first few weeks contained riveting, even bombshell, testimony.
Zuckerberg, in a deeply revealing email from 2022, had the “potentially crazy idea” of deleting all of Facebook’s users’ friends lists so they would have had to recreate that so-called social graph and therefore spend more time using Facebook, whose holding company was renamed Meta that year.
Or, as The Zuk put it, “wiping everyone’s graphs ... and having them start again”. He even suggested doing it every year.
Zuckerberg, whose apps are used by nearly 3-billion people, was anxious that Facebook’s “cultural relevance is decreasing quickly”. Clearly, he will stop at next to nothing to keep that from happening.
Fearing for the popularity of upstarts like WhatsApp and Instagram, Zuckerberg bought them. Instagram’s $1bn was considered eye-watering in 2012, while the $19bn for WhatsApp in 2014 was one of the highest paid for a start-up — especially one with zero revenue.
The antitrust trial by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about those two purchases, which the FTC argues were anticompetitive and have harmed US consumers. The lawsuit began during US President Donald Trump’s first term, long before the more damaging mental health concerns about unfettered use of social media worries have emerged.
Zuckerberg’s emails about needing to “neutralise” competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp have been part of court records for years. In court this week, FTC lawyers questioned him about those decisions. And, so, he squirmed.
In 2012, Facebook CFO David Ebersman emailed Zuckerberg to ask whether they were buying Instagram to “neutralise a competitor”? Zuckerberg agreed.
If that isn’t enough, in a 2018 email, Zuckerberg described what has become Facebook’s strategy for the past 15 years: “It is better to buy than compete.”
Those emails are as much of a smoking gun as the FTC could hope for.
Meanwhile, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom told the court last month that after buying the picture-sharing app Zuckerberg saw its rapid growth as a “threat”.
Despite its growth, Systrom was frustrated that Instagram was “starving” for investment but was being ignored by Facebook. When Facebook started beefing up its video offering and hired 300 new “video heads” in 2017 and none were assigned to Instagram, Systrom wrote that was “an unacceptable and offensive outcome”.
From 2018, he testified that Zuckerberg stopped giving support or providing links to Instagram from Facebook.
In 2025, Instagram is expected to account for half of all US advertising income for Meta.
“He believed we were hurting Facebook’s growth,” said Systrom, whose own emails from that time show he thought these changes cut Instagram’s growth by 100-million potential new monthly users a year.
Zuckerberg “was always very happy to have Instagram in the family because it was growing so quickly and we did great product work. But also I think as the founder of Facebook he felt a lot of emotion about which one was better.”
Used by more than 1-billion people now, Instagram was the sexiest social app for many years — before being eclipsed by TikTok. In 2025, Instagram is expected to account for half of all US advertising income for Meta.
Zuckerberg clearly knew this day was coming. A year before the FTC launched its antitrust investigation, he wrote, “I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.”
He added: “While most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up.”
Legal experts are already saying a break-up is likely — emails like “neutralise a competitor” and “it is better to buy than compete” are pretty definitive about Facebook’s intent at the time.
Under cross-examination last month, Zuckerberg tried to downplay the comments, saying: “I’m not sure [of] the full mess of what I wrote”.
That is unlikely to sway a judge.
The emergence of TikTok in 2018 was a “highly urgent” threat to Facebook. “We observed that our growth slowed down dramatically. It was highly urgent, this has been a top priority for the company for several years,” Zuckerberg testified.
Still, the break-up of Facebook is long overdue. Zuckerberg is one of the tech-bro oligarchs who have immense control over what people see and do on social media — mostly poorer people in developing countries. Yet he is unelected and seemingly all powerful.
This year, to appease Trump, Facebook shut down its fact-checking and online safety groups.
Let’s also not forget what Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen revealed about the social giant’s approach to the mental health of its young users — that it “prioritise growth over safety”. Or the Cambridge Analytica scandals. At the time Trump was first elected in 2016, 44% of Americans got their news from Facebook. That figure is much, much higher now and Facebook just killed off any fact-checking. Disinformation is so rife on Facebook it makes Robert Kennedy’s insane rants about vaccines seem tame by comparison.
Schadenfreude aside, will the trial actually result in any effective change, the cynical might ask? It’s too soon to say.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
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