To win monopoly fight, Meta is touting a rival: TikTok
Weeks into an antitrust trial that threatens the future of Meta Platforms' social-media empire, the company's best bet for a court victory might lie with one of its rivals: TikTok.
The Federal Trade Commission is seeking to break up Meta, alleging that it wields an illegal monopoly originally built more than a decade ago through Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. To prevail, the agency needs to show not only that Meta engaged in unlawful monopolization, but also that its dominance hasn't waned since. That is where TikTok comes in.
The FTC has been methodically presenting evidence to support its claim that Meta has muscled out most competition in the market for consumers who use social media to connect with friends and family. Meta has sought to undercut that claim by arguing that the social-media marketplace has evolved into a form of entertainment and news. In today's world, Meta says, TikTok's short-form video platform is a formidable rival. That position has scored some points.
Under questioning Wednesday from a Meta lawyer, a senior TikTok executive testified that his company isn't like Instagram and Facebook.
'We are an app and we have social features, but I don't think of us as a social app," said Adam Presser, TikTok's head of operations.
Meta's lawyers then highlighted a series of internal TikTok analyses that muddied the waters. 'YouTube and Instagram are TikTok's most important competitors," one management document from 2021 said.
They cited other records as well. 'The short-video interfaces on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are now virtually indistinguishable," TikTok told an Australian government agency in March.
TikTok has added social features, such as a friends tab, that make it feel more like a social-networking product, noted Meta lawyer Aaron Panner.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, in his own appearance on the witness stand last month, said Instagram and Facebook have become more like TikTok, moving from social networking to 'more of a broad discovery-entertainment space."
Kevin Systrom, Instagram's co-founder, mostly testified in support of the FTC's case. But he also made a similar observation about the transformation of social media.
'The current horizon of the products is all about entertaining users with video content," Systrom told the court. 'Facebook certainly and TikTok certainly and Instagram certainly. And I'll give you one more, which would be YouTube."
An internal TikTok document referred to Instagram as a competitor.
The FTC maintains that Facebook puts personal connections at the heart of the experience. Some of Meta's internal documents introduced in court by the FTC, such as survey data, show that people mainly value Facebook and Instagram for keeping up with friends and family.
TikTok
,
on the other hand, relies on an algorithm that determines which videos to show. The algorithm doesn't really care whether the user knows the person who made the video, according to Presser and other witnesses. The point is to keep the user engaged with the app.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is deciding the case without a jury, hasn't revealed much about his views so far, though some of his questions have suggested he isn't an avid user of social media.
He has sometimes questioned whether the different social-media platforms are really all that different, noting that they have many of the same features.
'Why isn't the way these are used now just a difference in degree?" Boasberg asked one FTC witness.
The commission is expected to continue presenting its case for at least another week. It has spent a majority of its time so far attempting to establish that Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp for the express purpose of neutralizing them as potential competitors.
FTC's lawyers have entered into evidence dozens of internal Meta emails and presentations that portrayed Zuckerberg and other executives as deeply worried that Instagram and mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp would erode Facebook's business and put it at a particular disadvantage on mobile devices.
Before it bought WhatsApp in 2014, for instance, Meta foresaw mobile messaging apps, which were particularly popular in Asia, as invading its social networking turf.
'Can you guys compile a this-sh—-is-getting-scary deck given all of the data we have now?" Javier Olivan, now Meta's chief operating officer, wrote in one email.
Even after Zuckerberg bought Instagram in 2012, he struggled with how much to promote the photo-sharing app, worried that its growth could cannibalize Facebook, according to testimony from Systrom. Meta denied its request for more resources to support video, spam-fighting, and data safety in 2018, when Instagram passed one billion users, Systrom said.
Systrom said his app could have grown into a formidable competitor to Facebook if it had remained independent. But under questioning from one of Meta's lawyers, he acknowledged that Meta's support fueled its rapid growth between 2012 and 2018.
'We grew much more quickly because we were part of Facebook than we would have as an independent company," Systrom said.
Write to Dave Michaels at dave.michaels@wsj.com
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