Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday highlighted the social media company facing tough competition with Tiktok.
Zuckerberg, who spent three days in the stands, said he has been thinking of Tiktok as the “best competitive threat” on Facebook and Instagram over the past few years.
Meta’s lead lawyer Mark Hansen pointed to a 2020 email from former Facebook executive Vijay Raj.
“Reels V2 is offensive and promising, but there are still some concerns as to whether it will be sufficient to neutralize the threat,” Raji wrote about the early version of Meta’s short video format, which was intended to compete with Tiktok.
“Titktok in the US is a much bigger threat to the apps of all of our families, and we need to create a stronger attack,” he continued.
The FTC initially sued Meta in 2020, accusing the social media giant of eliminating competition and trying to monopolise personal social networking with the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta points to competition with other social media companies like Tiktok, YouTube and X, claiming there is no monopoly.
FTC’s personal social networking market, including Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, claims it doesn’t take into account other competitors as it focuses on platforms that connect friends and family.
After about nine hours of questions by the FTC over two days, Zuckerberg faced questions from Meta’s lawyers from Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday morning.
Hansen attempted to highlight competition between Tiktok and YouTube, and downplayed the FTC’s proposal that Instagram and WhatsApp were tied up for success before being acquired by Meta.
He pointed to Zuckerberg’s concerns about Path, a social network that was now deprecated in 2012.
“I’m a little more worried about the pass,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time. “Of all new social startups, they’re perfect at the heart of what we’re trying to do about identifying and sharing friends.”
“In theory, we managed to survive on Foursquare, Quora, Dropbox, Instagram, and more, but if Path grows and isn’t wired deep into Facebook, that’s going to be a big problem for us,” he added.
Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Google’s Path+ saw Google+’s social network as a “direct competitor” on Facebook and that Instagram viewed it as “adjacent what we’re doing.”
He emphasized that he views the Instagram acquisition as a “build and purchase analysis” for the company, whether it is building its own products in-house or buying a company that has already been built.
“If you’re going to buy something… you’re removing the potential competitors for that use case from the market and making it your bet in that area,” Zuckerberg said.
Hansen also sought to reduce meta concerns about WhatsApp before its acquisition in 2014.
Several internal emails displayed by the FTC on Tuesday showed that meta-executives are concerned about the growth of mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp in 2012 and 2013, as well as the possibility that these apps could develop more social networking capabilities.
However, Hansen pointed to a 2012 email from Zuckerberg after a meeting with WhatsApp founder Jan Koum on Wednesday, suggesting that Koum has no plans to expand the app’s capabilities beyond messaging.
“I found him quite impressive, but unfortunately (or positively for us) not ambitious,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time.
