(Bloomberg) – Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta Platforms Inc., faces sharp inquiries from the Federal Trade Commission, is his second witness to breaking the social media giant.
Sandberg left Meta in 2022 for over 14 years as second place for Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s top business leader in Instagram and WhatsApp, and his key insights into its strategy. The FTC believes that these transactions were completed in 2012 and 2014, respectively, giving Meta a monopoly on the social networking industry and should be cancelled.
The FTC quickly moved to Sandberg’s credibility. FTC attorney Susan Musser first tried to determine people mainly use the company’s services to keep in touch with friends and family, and the agency said Meta has illegally monopolized the social media market.
Sandberg first said that most Facebook users “probably not” using the service when she left the company. However, when she delivered her sedimentary testimony from September 2022, she quickly changed the answer, saying: “I think that’s most of what people do.”
During the Instagram deal, Zuckerberg asked Sandberg if he had paid overpayment for the photo-sharing app, which offered $1 billion, according to past internal emails. “Yes, of course too much.” Sandberg felt differently at the booth Wednesday. “I don’t think that today anyone would say we’re giving too much for Instagram,” she said.
Meta is actively opposing the FTC’s monopoly claim, saying it can help Instagram and WhatsApp grows bigger than they themselves. Meta also refuted the FTC claims that it dominated the social network, believing it competes with various platforms, including Bytedance Ltd.’s Tiktok, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat, Google’s YouTube, Apple Inc.’s Imessage and Elon Musk’s X.
After establishing Alphabet Inc.’s Google search advertising business, Sandberg joined Fledgling Company in 2008, then known as Facebook Inc. Her arrival marked a big moment for Facebook as she brought meaningful management experience to the company, just as it began to build its own advertising business under Zuckerberg, who joined the 23-year-old.
As Meta’s second order, Sandberg participated in many discussions about getting Instagram and WhatsApp, and several emails and other internal documents appeared three days before the trial that began Monday. Like Zuckerberg, both sides viewed Sandberg as the main witness and began her testimony in the FTC, challenging some of Meta’s previous business decisions.
To demonstrate Meta’s monopoly power in the social media market, Musser presented Sandberg with a March 2018 board speech, not long after the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. According to the document, the metrics companies use to measure user satisfaction have declined. However, “no obvious impact on core participation indicators” – the FTC signal indicates that consumers have no other choice.
It was also asked about Sandberg, who tried to be inferior to competitors, especially blocking its ads on Facebook.
In a July 2011 message Sandberg posted to company employees, she wrote: “The most important thing to admit is that for the first time we have real competition and consumers have real choices.” The following year, Sandberg and Zuckerberg discussed whether to block ads that promote Google. “I’ll stop Google,” Sandberg wrote in an August 2012 message.
Sandberg tried to reshape her comments about Google being Meta’s only real competitor at the booth on Wednesday. “I said I would gather troops,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a fair reading of history. People have never had a direct copy of our products before.”
Zuckerberg ended his testimony earlier Wednesday after three days in the stands. He spent most of his time on intense inquiries on FTC’s attorney Daniel Matheson, who challenged him to defend the company’s acquisition strategy and believed that Meta was deliberately seeking to buy competitors rather than compete with them.
Although Sandberg is not always closely involved in the company’s product decisions, she goes out of her way to make money and oversee its advertising business. A key part of the FTC case is accusing consumers of being hurt by the dime acquisition. FTC lawyers believe Meta reduces the quality of the application by increasing the number of ads and watering users’ data privacy protections.
Given that her character runs Meta’s advertising business, Sandberg is expected to raise other questions on Thursday about whether Meta’s business decisions harm users of WhatsApp and Instagram.
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