New court filing shows that Meta execs agreed that the company was losing to TikTok
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other Meta execs thought that TikTok was beating Meta at its own game. That's according to a new filing in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, published on Monday.
The document, dated February 2022, includes conversations among a number of Meta execs discussing Facebook and Instagram's strategy and market position. In one message, Zuckerberg called Facebook a "challenger" that has "lost the mindshare and momentum," while adding that TikTok creates a "feeling of shared context" where friends see the same memes, he said.
Mosseri also agreed that Facebook should be thought of as a challenger now, noting it's no longer the default discovery engine. He proposed that the preferred discovery engine today could be YouTube, but he expected TikTok to surpass the Google-owned video platform in time, given the data Meta had on hand.
"The most natural differentiated … strategy for Facebook is to be the default discovery surface. But it's interesting that [TikTok] is 100% video and beating us badly," Mosseri wrote. "My guess is they're growing the social mobile market and eating into TV, long-form video, Netflix as well."
Mosseri was right. TikTok overtook YouTube for average watch time in the U.S. in 2021, one study found. Another study by the parental control software maker Qustodio discovered that kids ages 4 through 18 had spent 60% more time on TikTok than YouTube in 2023. Last year, TikTok began allowing 60-minute uploads to challenge YouTube.
And just this week, Netflix introduced its own TikTok-like experience in its mobile app, offering a new vertical video feed of recommended videos, personalized to the individual user.
In the trial, however, the U.S. government is attempting to prove that Meta violated competition laws by acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp to create a social networking monopoly. A document like this could damage the case, given that, internally, Meta execs were discussing how badly Facebook was being beaten by TikTok.
For instance, Zuckerberg noted that even if Facebook remained the biggest app in terms of the number of people who engage with it on a daily or weekly basis, it was no longer the biggest app by time spent.
He also pointed out that TikTok has a way to provide people with a sense of shared context. That is, if you and your friends are interested in the same things, you'll likely come across the same things in TikTok's feed, he said.
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