Mark Zuckerberg testifies YouTube screenshot
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in U.S. District Court this week, acknowledging that Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 because its in-app camera technology outperformed Facebook’s own. The revelation came during a high-stakes antitrust trial in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is challenging Meta’s past acquisitions.
Under intense questioning from FTC lawyers, Zuckerberg conceded that Instagram’s rapid growth and superior mobile photo-sharing features posed a competitive threat to Facebook at the time. Internal emails from Zuckerberg—cited in court—suggest he may have even considered spinning off Instagram to sidestep regulatory scrutiny.
The testimony marks a pivotal moment in the government’s broader effort to curb Big Tech monopolies and sheds light on how Meta has consolidated its dominance in the social media and digital advertising landscape.
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“I just wanted to be mindful that we should have a strategy that is creating the most value for the people we’re trying to serve, taking into account the direction that the politics seemed to be telling you at that time,” Mark Zuckerberg said.
“Building a new app is hard,” Zuckerberg added. “We’ve probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company, and the majority of them don’t go anywhere. We were doing a build vs. buy analysis. I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
“We could have built an app,” Mark Zuckerberg explained, “Whether it succeeded or not is a matter of speculation.”
A central argument for Meta’s lucrative ad business, which earned over $160 billion last year, is its claimed 3.3 billion daily users across its platforms. But the government’s opening statements directly challenged this, asserting that Meta’s extensive user base reflects a lack of consumer choice, stating that “consumers do not have reasonable alternatives.”
Meta’s legal team countered that significant competition exists within social media and that regulatory bodies approved the acquisitions years prior. Nevertheless, the FTC argued that these acquisitions were strategically made to avoid competition from potential future rivals by absorbing them. Evidence presented included a 2011 email from Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook executives outlining the rationale for acquiring Instagram due to setbacks in developing Facebook Camera.
