After weeks of arguments in the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta is done defending its decade-plus-old acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—at least for now.
The seven-week trial ended Tuesday, with the FTC urging Judge James Boasberg to rule that a breakup is necessary to end Meta's alleged monopoly in the "personal social networking services" market, where Meta currently faces sparse competition among other apps connecting friends and family. As alleged by the FTC, Meta's internal emails laid bare that Meta's motive in acquiring both Instagram and WhatsApp was to pay whatever it took to snuff out dominant rivals threatening to lure users away from Facebook—Mark Zuckerberg's jewel.
Talking to Bloomberg, Meta has maintained that the FTC's case is weak, seeking to undo deals that the FTC approved long ago while ignoring the competition Meta faces from rivals in the broader social media market, like TikTok. But Meta's attempt to shut down the case mid-trial was rebuffed by Boasberg, who has signaled he will take months to weigh his decision.
Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.
"The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."
According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.
When Adam Mosseri took over Meta-owned Instagram as CEO in 2018, the app was experiencing what he'd later call "concerning" drops and plateaus in user engagement, thanks partly to fierce competition from a new app: TikTok. Instagram estimated in 2019 that 23 percent of the decline in time spent on Instagram in the US was due to TikTok. Bytedance's video app kept expanding through the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. "We can't explain it all, but what's clear at this point is that we need to adapt, and do so quickly," Mosseri wrote to his team in March 2020. Instagram needed to recover, he testified Thursday in a DC courtroom, because "you're either growing, or you're slowly dying."
Mosseri described the dire situation while testifying in the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust trial against Meta, where the government alleges the company illegally monopolized the market for personal social networking services, a category that it says includes Snapchat but not more entertainment-focused apps like YouTube or TikTok. Mosseri's testimony highlighted how much Instagram sees itself as in competition with TikTok, but it also showed that even as entertainment content becomes a larger port …
Mosseri, who has been at the helm of Instagram since 2018, is among the more than two dozen witnesses that the Federal Trade Commission has called to testify in the case.
The FTC argues in its case against Meta that the company violated antitrust laws when it "helped cement" an illegal monopoly in the social networking market with its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and the messaging app WhatsApp two years later.
The case, to be decided by Judge James Boasberg, could be one of the most consequential antitrust trials in years. If FTC regulators have their way, Meta could be forced to sell off WhatsApp and Instagram.
Mosseri began his tenure at Meta, formerly called Facebook, in 2008. Here are five insights and revelations we learned from his more than six hours of testimony:
Mark Zuckerberg's 'strained' relationship with Instagram's founders
Mosseri recalled a 2018 email he sent to Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg while on paternity leave, warning that Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were increasingly frustrated with strategy changes.
He wrote that it was "hard for me to get a read on what's going on as the relationship was strained."
Mosseri cited two core tensions: Zuckerberg's belief that slowing Instagram's growth would benefit Meta overall.
Mosseri acted as a mediator, relaying concerns between the founders and Facebook leadership.
These tensions foreshadowed a deeper rift that culminated in the cofounders' departure later that year, a turning point that saw Mosseri take over the reins at Instagram.
Worry over TikTok cutting into Instagram's growth
TikTok's meteoric rise was a massive threat to Instagram, Meta has argued.
"TikTok is probably the fiercest competition we have faced during my tenure at the company," Mosseri testified on Thursday.
According to internal Meta documents presented in court, TikTok was a "big concern" in 2019, just as the ByteDance-owned app was taking off. Instagram data scientists presented a "conservative estimate" that 40% of Instagram's year-over-year decline in time spent was due to TikTok. Specifically in the US, Instagram estimated a 23% decline in time spent.
Instagram would go on to launch its own short-form video product, Reels, in 2020.
Mosseri also testified that he briefed Zuckerberg "very often" about the competition with TikTok, adding that there was a monthly dinner with the most senior executives at Meta where this would come up.
"It became kind of a hazing ritual for me to give an update on Reels," Mosseri said.
Mosseri's 'biggest mistake'
On the stand, Mosseri testified that Instagram's first version of Reels was his "biggest mistake," built on the "not a sound foundation" of Stories, which the feature was initially built into.
The feature flopped and was ultimately scrapped after nearly a year. Mosseri said before he joined Instagram that it tried another venture to compete with TikTok called IGTV — that too failed.
Instagram pivoted by relaunching Reels as a dedicated feature in the main feed, a reboot that finally gained traction amid the pandemic and TikTok's rapid rise. Mosseri said that the company "could have and should have been more aggressive" in responding to what he called Meta's fiercest competitor.
Hundreds of millions on content creators
Instagram's fight with TikTok and other apps is just beginning, Mosseri testified. Mosseri said that one of the biggest fights right now is over future creators, those who are just beginning to make content or who haven't even started. He said TikTok has done a better job allowing small creators to rapidly expand their reach, something Meta is actively trying to cut into.
In terms of overall investment, Mosseri said that Meta has spent "hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two" during his time at the company supporting the wider creative ecosystem.
That touches everything from incentive payments to the physical infrastructure necessary to power Instagram's AI-backed recommendations.
"We are just seeing more and more power shift from institutions to individuals across the industry," Mosseri testified.
Instagram's struggles around content safety
Susan Musser, the FTC attorney who led Mosseri's questioning, repeatedly questioned the Instagram head over his initial concerns about how the app was ensuring the safety of its content.
Mosser pointed to an email from October 19, 2018, less than a month after Mosseri became head of the app, in which he said that Facebook was not investing enough in Instagram's Well-being team.
"I think we're underinvested in Well-being and were, until recently, the resources we do have are underleveraged," Mosseri wrote to someone whose full name was redacted. The initial email the person wrote was titled, "need to prioritize integrity efforts over growth — we must fight fakes."
An internal Facebook document also showed that Instagram had significantly fewer engineers devoted to well-being than the main app. According to the 2018 summary, Instagram had 40 engineers dedicated to doing such work. Facebook had 900.
Meta lawyer Aaron Panner later asked Mosseri if Meta employees typically received everything they requested.
Adam Mosseri has been the head of Instagram since 2018.
Drew Angerer/Getty
Instagram has been throwing cash at content creators for years.
During the FTC v. Meta antitrust trial, Instagram's top exec, Adam Mosseri, revealed how much.
Mosseri said Instagram has "invested hundreds of millions" into creators.
Instagram has spent big bucks on wooing content creators.
Adam Mosseri, Instagram's top executive, took the stand on Thursday to testify during the ongoing FTC antitrust trial against Meta. The FTC has accused Meta of acting as a monopoly in personal social networking with its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Mosseri testified that the company has "invested hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two, over the course of my tenure" on creators.
Mosseri said the money included both incentives as well as the physical infrastructure that makes it possible for the app to expand a creator's reach.
In 2018, Mosseri took over as head of Instagram after the app's original cofounders stepped down from the company. Since then, creators have gradually become more and more of a core focus for the Meta-owned company.
Instagram has launched (and shut down) a handful of creator monetization programs since 2020 to compete with other platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which also pay creators. Some programs, like Instagram's "Bonuses," that pay creators for content like reels or photos, are limited and invite-only. Earlier this year, Meta had offered some creators between $2,500 to $50,000 a month to post content to Instagram.
"We believe creators are becoming more and more relevant over time," Mosseri said at another point during his testimony. "We are just seeing more and more power shift from institutions to individuals across the industry."
Facebook is testing a downvote feature for comment sections. It's designed to cut down on spam.
It would allow you to downvote comments that aren't "useful."
Facebook has tested a dislike or downvote button before, but it never stuck. Will this be different?
Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to make Facebook great again, and Meta announced a tiny new feature that might be a step toward that goal.
As part of a series of features and policies aiming to cut down on spammy content, Facebook is testing a "downvote" button for comment sections. This would allow people to anonymously downvote comments that they deem less "useful."
This wouldn't be the first time something like this has come up. For nearly as long as the "like" button has existed (since 2009), the masses have yearned for a "dislike" button. Meta has toyed around with testing a feature like this, but ultimately has never done it.
Back in 2016, Facebook added the extra "reaction" emojis (smiling, laughing, hugging, loving). Geoff Teehan, a product design director at Facebook at the time, wrote a Medium post in 2016: "About a year ago, Mark [Zuckerberg] brought together a team of people to start thinking seriously about how to make the Like button more expressive."
Teehan explained why they went with additional reactions instead of just a "thumbs down" emoji:
We first needed to consider how many different reactions we should include. This might seem like a pretty straightforward task: Just slap a thumbs down next to the Like button and ship it. It's not nearly that simple though.
People need a much higher degree of sophistication and richness in what choices we provide for their communications. Binary 'like' and 'dislike' doesn't properly reflect how we react to the vast array of things we encounter in our real lives.
In 2017, Facebook also tested out a "thumbs down" reaction button for Messenger. This would've been similar to the Apple iMessage reactions that launched in the fall of 2016 and included a thumbs-down emoji.
Instagram has also considered something like this. In February of this year, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted about a test of downvoting Instagram comments:
But will people understand what the downvote arrow actually means? Will they use it on comments that are extraneous and actually not "useful," or will they use it to try to crush comments they don't agree with or don't like?
I asked Meta about this, and a spokesperson told me that, unlike past tests of a dislike or thumbs-down button, this test will explicitly tell users that it's about being useful —a little text bubble below the button will say, "Let us know which comments aren't useful."
The test is still just a test. It might not actually end up being rolled out. Personally, I think that less-useful comments are less of a burning issue than some of the other AI-slop stuff on Facebook. (Facebook is working on combating some of that, too.) But hey, that's just my questionably useful comment.
Instagram Edits, Meta’s newly released video creation app, had a bigger debut than its direct competitor, ByteDance’s CapCut, once did. The new app, which today helps users craft videos for Instagram reels, stories, and other social posts, was downloaded an estimated 702,900 times on iOS devices during its first two days on the market. That’s […]
At the Meta monopoly trial, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom accused Mark Zuckerberg of draining Instagram resources to stifle growth out of sheer jealousy.
According to Systrom, Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in yanking resources after integrating Instagram and Facebook because "as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better—Instagram or Facebook," The Financial Times reported.
In 2025, Instagram is projected to account for more than half of Meta's ad revenue, according to eMarketer's forecast. Since 2019, Instagram has generated more ad revenue per user than Facebook, eMarketer noted, and today makes Meta twice as much per user as the closest rival that Meta claims it fears most, TikTok.
Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads’ over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level […]
Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of Global Public Policy for Facebook and author of the recently released tell-all book “Careless People,” told U.S. senators during her testimony on Wednesday that Meta actively targeted teens with advertisements based on their emotional state. This claim was first documented by Wynn-Williams in her book, which documents […]
Meta is developing a version of Instagram for iPad, according to The Information. Currently, running Instagram on an iPad is just a blown-up version of the iPhone app, so an official Instagram app from Meta would be a very welcome change.
Why would Meta do this now, after ignoring Apple’s tablet for over a decade? According to The Information, the uncertain legal status of TikTok amid the divest-or-ban law and Trump’s tariffs might be the push required.
The company has publicly resisted building an iPad Instagram app before. In February 2022 (more than three years ago!) Instagram boss Adam Mosseri replied to a post from Marques Brownlee about Meta still not having an Instagram app for iPad to explain why.
“We get this one a lot,” Mosseri said. “It’s still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority. Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we’re very heads down on other things.”
Yup, we get this one a lot. It's still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority. Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we're very heads down on other things.
In 2023, Mosseri said something similar. “Not working on it right now,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing to do at some point. But we have only so many people working at Instagram, so we’ve got to pick the most important things to do to improve Instagram at any given moment. And right now, it’s not quite making the cut.”
Using the Instagram app in Stage Manager on supported iPads is a decent experience, and the web app has improved in recent years. But a native version that takes full advantage of the large display is long overdue.
Meta didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the company is looking to improve the app’s search functionality, admitting this is an area where Instagram could do more to compete. The remarks, made on a recent episode of the “Build Your Tribe” podcast, come at a time when younger Gen Z users often turn to social apps like […]
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