(Bloomberg) – Mark Zuckerberg argued in federal court that his company’s social network is more than just friends, and that it was the first witness to the FTC’s antitrust trial.
Zuckerberg said allowing people to connect with friends and family “still be one of our priorities.” But, “We have always been a service that allows you to discover and understand what’s going on in the world.”
The FTC is seeking to break down Meta Platforms Inc. and believes its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp are shared with friends and family in 2012 and 2014, respectively, which gives it an illegal monopoly. Zuckerberg disputed the FTC’s allegations, saying Meta competed with what the company said was a wider social media company, including YouTube, Tiktok and Snap.
Zuckerberg described the creation of a 2006 Facebook news feed in an afternoon inquiry by Daniel Matheson, the FTC’s lead trial attorney, to promote “real connection with actual friends.”
During the mobile app boom between 2010 and 2012, Zuckerberg worked hard to get his team to build high-quality photo-sharing products. Matheson showed off Zuckerberg’s email, saying it was following it lagging far behind Instagram, including a June 2011 message that they needed to “quickly blend their behavior.”
That September, he said: “If Instagram continues to kick A-buy them on mobile devices or Google, then in the next few years they can easily add their services to replicate what they are doing now, and if they’re more and more people’s photos, that’s a real problem for us.”
In February 2012, Zuckerberg wrote a message intending to buy Instagram “even if it costs about $500 million.”
Zuckerberg, 40, is expected to stand in the stands for the rest of the day and most of Tuesday. He walked in with his assistant, wearing a navy suit and pink tie. The court was full when he started the testimony, but as the inquiry continued, the audience filtered.
The trial began early Monday with an opening ceremony for both sides, hosted by Chief Justice James Boasberg. Institutional lawyers initiate their argument by invoking the long-standing U.S. tradition of seeking to secure a competitive market, while the FTC accuses the meta of violating the competitive market.
“For more than 100 years, U.S. public policy insists that if companies want to succeed, they must compete,” Matheson said in his opening speech. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”
If FTC prevails, derivatives from Instagram and WhatsApp will undo the integration between the apps, undermine the world’s two most popular digital consumer products and potentially remove hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta market value. This will also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves the transaction.
The trial is expected to last about two months and also provides testimony from former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. The company argued on Monday it faces fierce competition for several other services, especially when social media becomes more focused on the entertainment side than friends and family and offers obvious benefits to its users.
The final decision will depend on how social media is defined and whether Meta dominates the market. The FTC will focus on how people communicate with their friends and family – the so-called “personal social networking services” market, which claims this is mainly composed of messages and media shared between close contacts.
“Killer Obtaining”
The FTC believes Meta-buying Instagram and WhatsApp are “killer acquisitions” that prevent these companies from competing. To support the case where its components are monopoly, the FTC will argue that the quality of its applications has declined, most notably advertising has increased and weakened privacy protections.
Matheson in 2010 “Meta faces ocean changes in competitive conditions” referring to the growing mobile market. “They think competition is too difficult and buying out competitors is much easier than competing with them.”
According to Matheson, Meta bought WhatsApp in part to defend against a quote from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which is also considering buying the company. Meta also considered buying Snap Inc. for $6 billion in 2013, although Snapchat owners rejected the offer. This number was not clear before, as the report at the time fixed the discussion to half.
SNAP representatives declined to comment.
Matheson said in his opening argument that the FTC will focus on “smoking gun” emails from Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, especially a 2012 letter that he described the Instagram protocol as a way to “neutralize competitors.”
Matheson said after Meta bought Instagram, it “fundamentally manipulated the experience”, allowing it to avoid swallowing its own more profitable Facebook product. While this is a “rational business decision”, Matheson said it “offensives the policy of antitrust law.”
Meta has pushed back aggressively against the FTC’s claims, arguing that it competes intensely with a variety of platforms, including ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, Snap’s Snapchat, Google’s YouTube, Apple Inc.’s iMessage and Elon Musk’s X. The FTC’s case is “at war with the facts and at war with the law,” said Meta lawyer Mark Hansen in his opening remarks, noting That among all Meta competitors, Matheson mentioned Tiktok only once in his opening remarks.
Only Snapchat competes with Meta, and many other competitors, including MySpace, have now gone bankrupt, the agency said.
Hansen said that over time, consumers’ use of the app has changed dramatically, shifting to more passive engagement, such as videos, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and Tiktok. Although the FTC is focused on people using services to communicate with friends and family, Hansen said that this has dropped, with less than 20% of the meta-clients using these services in 2025.
To express their point of view, Hansen pointed to the January 2025 Tiktok “Ban” and noted that Facebook and Instagram both saw peaks in usage when Tiktok went bankrupt. During this period, Facebook saw 20% of “more usage”, while Instagram usage increased by 17%, Hanson said. “The entire FTC case convinced the court that Mehta did not compete with Tiktok,” Hansen said.
Hansen also believes Meta drove “hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly over a trillion dollars in undeniable consumer welfare benefits,” which is the reason for the two deals, with the increase in users as infrastructure improves.
Meta noted that the FTC had the opportunity to challenge the deals – Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and allowed them to continue.
Meta had several key executives in court Monday, including policy director Joel Kaplan, general counsel Jennifer Newstead and chief marketing officer Alex Schultz.
The FTC investigated META in the first Trump administration in 2019 and sued the company in December 2020. The Biden administration, led by former FTC Chairman Lina Khan, filed a lawsuit, which is now under the control of Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was appointed as an agency in January by President Donald Trump.
(Updated with internal Zuckerberg email in paragraph 5.)
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