Former meta COO Sheryl Sandberg took the position to face intense questions from the FTC on Wednesday as the FTC is about to break up the Mark Zuckerberg social media giant.
Bloomberg Report Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta and longtime commander of Mark Zuckerberg, took the position as a key witness to the FTC. The agency claims that Meta’s Instagram acquisition in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 gave the social networking industry an illegal monopoly and attempted to cancel those transactions.
As Meta’s deputy commander at the time of the acquisition, Sandberg played a key role in the company’s business strategy. The FTC wasted no time trying to undermine her credibility by presenting conflicting statements about the main purpose of Facebook users and the value of Instagram.
When asked whether the majority of Facebook users used the service to maintain connections with friends and family, Sandberg initially said that by the time she left the company, “probably not.” However, when faced with her deposition testimony from September 2022, she asserted that it was in fact a large part of the user’s activity, so she quickly revised the answer.
The FTC also highlighted the email exchange between Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the time of Instagram’s acquisition, and Zuckerberg asked if there was an overpayment for the photo sharing app. Sandberg replied, “Yes, of course that’s too much.” However, during her testimony, she backtracked, saying, “I don’t think anyone would say there’s too much on Instagram today.”
As reported previously by Breitbart News, the FTC claims Facebook will keep Instagram and WhatsApp overpayments out of the way as a “killer acquisition.”
The FTC claims that Meta’s Instagram and WhatsApp purchases are “killer acquisitions” designed to eliminate competition and maintain monopoly in the social media market. After getting Instagram, Matheson claimed that Meta “fundamentally manipulated the experience” provided by the service to avoid cannibalism in its own more profitable Facebook product.
The FTC believes Zuckerberg is specifically looking to adopt rival social media sites that focus on connections with friends and family. Zuckerberg testified that friends and family are key elements of Facebook, but that’s not the only focus. He said, “We’ve always been a service where we can discover and learn about what’s going on in the world.”
Meta vehemently denys the FTC’s exclusive claims, claiming it will help Instagram and WhatsApp achieve more growth than they could have achieved independently. The company also challenges the notion that it controls social networking, highlighting fierce competition from various platforms such as China’s Tiktok, Snapchat, YouTube, Apple Imessage and X (formerly Twitter).
The FTC presented evidence suggesting meta’s monopoly power in the social media market, including a board presentation from March 2018 that showed declines in user satisfaction following the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. Nevertheless, “there was no visible impact on the core engagement metrics.” It shows the FTC that consumers lack alternative options.
Sandberg was also questioned about his suspected Meta efforts to put a competitor at a disadvantage by blocking ads on Facebook. Sandberg, Google+, a July 2011 message discussing the launch of Google’s social networking service, wrote, “For the first time, there’s competition and consumers have real options.” However, she later discussed whether to block ads promoting Zuckerberg and Google+, saying, “I’ll block Google.”
From the witness stand, Sandberg attempted to reconstruct the comments that Google was the only real competitor in the meta, and issued those statements to “bring the troops together,” claiming it was not a “fair reading of history.”
As the trial continues, Sandberg is expected to face further questions about Meta’s business decisions and the potential impact on WhatsApp and Instagram users. Given her role in overseeing Meta’s advertising operations, the FTC may investigate whether these decisions have hurt consumers by increasing the number of ads and weakening data privacy protections.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News, which covers the issues of freedom of speech and online censorship.
