In Meta’s antitrust test on Wednesday, Meta Mark Zuckerberg’s CEO testified that Tiktok’s success was the risk for Meta businesses, saying that the brief video application was a “top priority” and a “extremely urgent” competitive threat when 2018 arrived in 2018 Parachute and other shops.
The reports come from a full week of testimony at the US Federal Trade Trial against the social networking giant. If FTC lawyers dominate, the trial could possibly require META to rotate Instagram or WhatsApp as separate companies.
Specifically, Zuckerberg admitted on Wednesday that Tiktok’s arrival had directly affected Meta, saying that his company had noticed that his “growth slowed dramatically” when Tiktok became popular. He also said that the application belonging to ByTedance continued to be the focus of META’s competitive efforts for several years.
ByTedance bought Musical.ly in 2017 and forgiven it with Tiktok next year. At about the same time, Meta (then known as Facebook) stopped reporting Facebook user numbers in his quarterly exhibitions, shifting to a new “Application Family” measurement that included Instagram and Whatsapp. The change was designed to hide the fact that Meta’s flagship was to slow growth.
Zuckerberg made another interesting comment during the trial in response to a question about the “network effects” of social media platforms. He said that it is less important for social media applications to use links between friends and family to develop.
“Applications now serve mainly as discovery engines,” Zuckerberg told court. “People can get this content in messaging engines.”
At the same time, however, Facebook is trying to return to its “roots OG”, once again turning to these network effects. The company has recently released new features designed to facilitate connection to friends, including a tab of refreshed friends that highlights requests and friend activity. In January, Zuckerberg told investors that “return to OG Facebook” was a key goal for 2025.
