Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg confirmed Tuesday that he bought Instagram because it was “better” than the Facebook camera app. This is because there is a possibility that the social media giant could break up on the second day of the FTC’s Landmark Trial.
Zuckerberg returned to the US District Court stands in Washington, DC, where FTC lawyers focused on smoking gun emails from Zuckerberg to Facebook Underlings around the 2012 acquisition of Instagram.
When he pressed whether he was worried about Instagram’s growth poses a threat, Zuckerberg admitted that he felt he had built a better photo app than what Facebook was developing.
“Building a new app is difficult,” Zuckerberg said.
“We’ve probably tried to build dozens of apps in the history of the company, but most of them won’t go anywhere.”
Zuckerberg avoided questions about whether Meta, called Facebook, was trying to crush the threat of competition against his company.
“We were doing builds and purchasing analysis,” Zuckerberg said. “I thought Instagram was good, so I thought it would be better to buy it.”
The FTC claims it used a “buy or buried” strategy to win major rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to prevent Meta from challenging its established monopoly on social media.
It forced Instagram, which was acquired for $1 billion in 2012, and bought it for about $19 billion in 2014.
The Fed highlighted an email exchange in 2012, when Zuckerberg confirmed to Ex-CFO David Ebersman that it would “neutralise competitors” by purchasing Instagram.
“One way to see this is that we’re really buying time,” Zuckerberg added in the exchange. “Whether some new competitors spring up, or buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc., we’ll give everyone more than a year to integrate dynamics before they can get closer to scale again.”
Another exchange with 2012 showed Zuckerberg who is unhappy with Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, fearing that WhatsApp is competing for its own chat service, Facebook Messenger.
“Messenger didn’t exactly beat WhatsApp. Instagram was growing much faster than us, so we had to buy it for $1 billion,” Zuckerberg said in an email to Sandberg. “It doesn’t exactly kill it.”
The FTC also highlighted some awful emails Zuckerberg exchanged, including a 2012 message that admitted “Instagram could hurt us meaningfully” and was “pretty threatening.”
In another 2008 email that was scrutinized, Zuckerberg said “it’s better to buy than to compete.”
In the eyewitness stand, Zuckerberg tried to push back the FTC’s claim that Facebook bought Instagram due to a surge in user base.
“It’s not accurate to say that the only reason we were interested is scale or growth,” Zuckerberg said.
“We could have built an app,” he added. “It’s a matter of guessing whether it was successful or not.”
Meta stocks remained flat in trading on Tuesday.
The FTC case may depend on whether Judge James Boasberg can be convincing in a nonjudication trial that the definition of meta’s market is accurate.
Sandberg is scheduled to appear in the stands on Wednesday. Other well-known upcoming witnesses include Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and current Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.
The potential losses on Instagram are considered particularly dangerous to the meta, as photo-sharing apps account for more than half of US-based advertising revenue.
In previous testimony on Monday, Zuckerberg resisted the FTC’s attempt to define meta as dominant among social media companies built on sharing between friends and family.
“The ‘friends’ part has gone down considerably, but it’s something we still care about,” Zuckerberg said.
In its opening statement, the FTC claimed that the only direct competitor of meta-owned Facebook and Instagram is Snapchat, a lesser-known privacy-focused app called Mewe. Other platforms, such as video-centric Tiktok and professionally focused LinkedIn, are in different categories, according to the Fed.
Meta’s lawyers fought back, claiming that the FTC has eliminated the fierce competition facing people from things like Tiktok and YouTube to exclude users’ attention.
Zuckerberg tried to avoid an FTC trial by settlement, so he spent a comfortable time with President Trump prior to the trial.
Aside from donating $1 million to Trump’s Inaugural Fund and attending his oath ceremony, Zuckerberg eliminated the fact-checking and DEI programme that the president’s allies have widely criticized.
The billionaire also bought a mansion in Washington, D.C. and reportedly has personally visited the White House at least three times since January.
With post wire
