Meta saw Tiktok as 'very urgent' threat, says Zuckerberg during antitrust hearing

(Bloomberg) – Mark Zuckerberg said that Tiktok of BiteDance Ltd. A ‘very urgent’ competitive threat to Meta Platforms Inc. It was when it came up for the first time in 2018, as he testified for a third day in the antitrust trial of the Federal Trade Commission. “We noticed that our growth has slowed down dramatically,” Tiktok became popular, the CEO of the Meta Wednesday said. “It was very urgent, it has been a top priority for the business for several years.” For the past two days, Zuckerberg spent seven hours being questioned by a government lawyer, which pushed him to the fight for the company – then Facebook Inc. – Review to keep up with the mobile app boom in the previous decade. This led to the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp of the business more than ten years ago, and in response to Tiktok, the role of its roles video product for Instagram in 2020. The FTC wants to force Meta to sell the apps as he tries to paint Zuckerberg as a smart executive who has part of the social media market rather than compete with them. If he responds to his lawyer Mark Hansen, he can tell his story without setback. “People will share in new ways in five years as happening today,” Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg said Meta competes with a variety of platforms, which also have Google’s YouTube and Apple Inc. iMessage includes, but also X, Telegram, Microsoft Corp. LinkedIn and others. The FTC maintains that Meta, in the narrow market to share information with friends and family, only with Snap Inc. Snapchat competes. ‘Network effects’ part of the FTCs in case involves the technical concept of ‘network effects’, which means that the more users like Meta, the more likely it is to maintain a dominant position, because people are unlikely to switch to a service used by few people. US district judge James Boasberg, who is serving on the non-Jurie hearing in Washington, remained largely silent during the interrogation, but interrupted on Wednesday during Zuckerberg’s testimony to ask if network effects still really mattered. “How much does it matter if your friends are on a specific platform if you can send content out of the platform? Why does it matter if your friends are there? ‘ said the judge. Zuckerberg said it didn’t. “These programs are now mainly serving as discovery engines,” he said. “People can take the content to messages -engines.” If the FTC reigned, a spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp would undo years of integration between the apps, disrupting two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and possibly eradicating hundreds of billions of dollars in the market value of Meta. It will also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves transactions. Sometimes he tried to return to the statements he made in previous internal communications earlier this week by FTC attorney Daniel Matheson, Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg acknowledged in a 2013 email that blocked ads on Facebook for messages -Apps WeChat, Kakao and Line, which he wrote, “try to build social networks to replace us.” On the stand this week, however, he said, “It is difficult for me to characterize what their intention was.” When asked by Hansen to describe how he evaluated the competitive threat posed by Instagram and others at the time of the transactions, he referred to a quote from former CEO of Intel Corp, Andy Grove, and said: “Only the paranoid survival.” Matheson also tried to show that Meta, then known as Facebook Inc., was aware of the antitrustric risk years ago, including a possible break-up, with an email from 2018 when Zuckerberg wrote: “If calls to break the major technology companies, there is a non-trivial chance that we will come out in the next 5-10 years.” More stories like these are available on Bloomberg.com © 2025 Bloomberg LP first published: 16 Apr 2025, 09:39 IST