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Spinning off Instagram, the decline of ‘friending’ and other takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg at the FTC monopoly trial


CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp on the stand this week during the start of trial over the blockbuster antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission.

Thatwas one of several takeaways from more than 10 hours of testimony from Meta’s CEO, during which he pushed back on the FTC’s claims that the company has built an illegal “social network monopoly” by acquiring would-be rivals. The testimony painted a picture of how Zuckerberg views the competition and the company’s struggles to keep up with a rapidly evolving social media landscape that it argues has pushed users toward rivals like TikTok and YouTube. In 2018, Zuckerberg raised concerns to other executives that “as calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway,” according to an email produced in court.

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