If the FTC wins, Instagram can be transferred from Meta’s “family of applications”, which, according to the FTC, would force Meta for the first time to face competition as social media society focused on the connection of friends and family.
Some criticisms believe that Meta has never really had rivals. In 2012, Zuckerberg said in his speech with the Startup School that Facebook had no beef with MySpace, for example, which collapsed in the face of Facebook competition. Instead, he insisted that for Facebook, “it’s not about winning and losing. It is a question of doing something precious.”
But when Zuckerberg tried to claim that there was “more than one social network in 2012, the startup interviewer The school suddenly interrupted him.
“More than one social network? Not really,” joked the interviewer, making the audience laugh loudly by emphasizing the evidence.
Rather than pointing Facebook rivals, Zuckerberg dodged by saying that Facebook’s integration into a wide range of applications had done almost everything people did social.
“My point of view in the world is that almost all products and the category will be transformed and redesigned to be social,” said Zuckerberg, almost paving the way for Meta’s argument today that he faces a vast competition in all directions, including video applications like Youtube or professional social networks like Linkedin.
Similarly, during the Techcrunch 2012 conference, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook does not concern the dominant markets, but rather consists in carrying out its vision of expanding the way in which humans connect in the world.
“We are not creating services to earn money,” said Zuckerberg. “We earn money to create better services.” And that “really goes to the heart of the philosophy we have in business management,” he said. “We exist and we wake up in the morning, and what excites us is to make a world more open and connected.”
Systrom told court that, in reality, Zuckerberg led Facebook according to his personal desire to make his flagship product remain. When he was faced with an email in which Sytrom praised Instagram’s apparently inevitable integration with Facebook to stimulate growth, Systerom said “that it only emphasized the advantage of appearing Zuckerberg,” reported the rod, in the midst of growing tensions between the founders. And when Meta’s lawyer asked if it meant that he was lying in the e-mail, Systrom seemed to lack patience for Meta’s questioning line, only responding with a “gentleman”.
On X, Benedict joked saying that for everyone looking closely at the testimony of one of the star witnesses of the FTC, it was “the” sir “heard in the world”.
