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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, testifying for the second consecutive day in a landmark antitrust trial brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), told the court on Tuesday that Facebook decided to buy Instagram because the app had a “better” camera.
At the time, Facebook was engaged in a “build vs. buy analysis” to enhance its own mobile camera features. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them,” Zuckerberg said, according to Reuters.
Facebook ended up acquiring Instagram for $1 billion in 2012—a move that, alongside the company’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014, now sits at the heart of the FTC’s sweeping antitrust case against Meta.
The FTC’s claim: Meta killed competition
The trial, which is taking place in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, could pose a serious threat to Meta’s $1.4 trillion empire. The FTC alleges that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were designed to eliminate competition and help the company illegally build a monopoly in the social media space.
The trial marks the culmination of years of investigation, with regulators arguing that Meta has used its market dominance to suppress innovation and box out emerging rivals.
Zuckerberg hits back: Competition is fierce from TikTok and YouTube
Meta is vigorously contesting the FTC’s allegations. In a blog post published Sunday, the company’s Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead described the FTC’s claims as “weak.” She argued that the lawsuit “conveniently ignores” the competitive pressures Meta faces from platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
Echoing that sentiment in court on Monday, Zuckerberg stated, “We compete vigorously” with both TikTok and YouTube.
To support their argument, Meta highlighted recent user data: According to TheWrap, the average Facebook user in the U.S. spends 63 minutes per day on the app, while Instagram users spend 48 minutes. Combined, that just edges past the 108-minute daily average spent by American TikTok users.
Old emails of Zuckerberg under scrutiny
During Monday’s session, the FTC presented an internal email from Zuckerberg in which he floated a “potentially crazy idea” aimed at boosting engagement on Facebook: delete every user’s list of “friends” and then prompt them to re-add connections, potentially leading to more time spent on the platform.
Zuckerberg returned to the witness stand on Tuesday, facing more questions about his past communications regarding the company’s acquisition strategy. In one 2012 email, Zuckerberg wrote about Instagram and another app, Path: their “businesses are nascent but the networks are established, the brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us.”
That email was shared publicly on X (formerly Twitter) by Matthew Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, who is attending the trial in person.
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