CEO of social media giant Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken the witness stand in the first day of the company's anti-trust trial, brought forward by the Federal Trade Commission.
Monday (Tuesday AEST) was one of an expected two days of testimony from Zuckerberg in a trial that centres around allegations Meta purchased competing social media companies to force a monopoly on the market sector, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta relies on the 3.3 billion daily users across all platforms as one of the core selling points of its ad business, which in 2024 saw more than US$160 billion in revenue.
One of the key points against the social media giant from the FTC is that this huge audience has been gained through a lack of choice, and that “consumers do not have reasonable alternatives” to Meta’s platforms.
If the FTC wins the current court case, Meta could be looking at splitting up, damaging the company’s business of digital advertising, as well as more broadly creating a reshuffle of the social media world.
On the first day of the trial, Zuckerberg faced questioning about the shift of Facebook from a platform designed to facilitate social connections to being focused on showing users third-party content, including the launch of features like the news feed and groups.
“It’s the case that over time, the ‘interest’ part of that has gotten built out more than the ‘friend’ part,” Zuckerberg conceded.
“(Users are) connected to a lot more groups and other kinds of things. The ‘friend’ part has gone down quite a bit, but it’s still something we care about.”
The majority of his testimony then focused on the messaging features built into most of Meta’s platforms, which could be essential to how the FTC defines the social media “market” Meta dominates.
