Meta Has Requested the FTC’s Antitrust Case Be Thrown Out Mid-Trial

The trial began at the start of the week of April 14, 2025, with Meta summoned to Washington to defend its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in a landmark case brought by the US Federal Trade Commission. The FTC alleges that the deals were part of a broader monopolistic strategy and is seeking to unwind them to restore competition in the social media market.

Meta, which was known as Facebook at the time, bought the photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012 and the messaging platform WhatsApp in 2014. It argues that the acquisitions fueled the apps’ growth and that there’s little evidence they would have evolved into viable competitors on their own.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg maintained that he never intended to stifle competition through acquisition, according to live reporting from The Verge. “Was the intent to stop offering or stop making Instagram good? Absolutely not,” he said. His hope was just to scale the app’s user base tenfold, but he had done so hundredfold by 2018.

Zuckerberg and the Meta team emphasised that the company has always faced — and continues to face — rivals while building Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including platforms like TikTok and Google Plus.

Ongoing coverage: We’re updating this piece on a regular basis to reflect the latest courtroom developments.

Day 20: Thursday, May 15

The headline news Thursday was Meta’s request to dismiss the antitrust case, arguing that the FTC has not produced evidence to show that it has monopolised the social networking market through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

In its motion, the company maintains that competitors like TikTok, YouTube, and iMessage challenge its position. Monopolisation broadly refers to a company being able to raise prices or degrade services without losing customers, but Meta argues that its apps are free and have improved over time with enhanced features and infrastructure. The company notes it has also seen engagement and user numbers rise, which it says reflects competitive, not monopolistic, behavior.

Meta argues that there is no evidence the acquisitions of Instagram or WhatsApp caused harm — a necessary element to prove they were intended to eliminate rivals — only speculation about what might have happened if the companies had remained independent. The company also challenges the FTC’s “personal social networking services” market definition excludes apps it sees as competitors.

For these reasons, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is asking the judge to end the trial midway, asserting the FTC has failed to make its case even before Meta presents its defense. However, the trial is still scheduled to proceed with Meta’s defense next week.

Day 19: Wednesday, May 14

Hemphill continued his testimony, arguing that if Facebook truly faced meaningful competition from other social apps, it would need to offer users a “surplus,” some added benefit or perk beyond free access, according to The Verge. He added that when Meta improves ad quality, it responds by increasing the volume of ads shown to users, rather than keeping the ad load steady and passing the quality gains on to users. This, he claimed, would be more likely in a competitive market.

Meta’s attorney took aim at Hemphill’s claim, suggesting he had “crop(ped) the axis to magnify changes that aren’t changes” on a graph which appeared to show declining user sentiment. He also argued that Hemphill lacked evidence demonstrating that Meta shows more ads to users who engage solely with posts from friends. To counter this, Meta produced a chart indicating that younger users, who tend to interact primarily within their network, actually see fewer ads. Hemphill responded by saying that older people, who may see more ads, make up a larger proportion of Facebook’s overall user base.

Hemphill responded to the point brought up numerous times that he urged regulators to launch an antitrust investigation into Meta in 2019, discrediting his testimony. He said that he disclosed this prior to this trial, was not paid for his work on the campaign, and did not, at the time, have the view that the WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions were anticompetitive. Nevertheless, Hansen ended his questioning by telling Hemphill: “You’ve known what you thought of this case before you saw a shred of evidence,” according to The Verge.

Next to the stand was Head of Facebook Tom Alison. The FTC, wanting to prove that Meta is aware it is reducing the app’s quality by deprioritising friend content, brought out a Facebook survey that showed “3 of the 4 top user pain points were related to friend content.” Alison rebutted this by claiming that users don’t really know what they want. “When people actually got more friend content on Facebook they visited Facebook less,” he said, according to The Verge. He also pointed out that a “growing” number of users with zero Facebook friends.

Nevertheless, Facebook introduced a dedicated tab that only shows content from Facebook friends. Alison said this was more for “nostalgia” as the app moves towards more algorithmically generated content, but also prevents friend content from being buried, according to The Verge. The judge suggested that Facebook could theoretically reduce the prevalence of friend content in the main feed because it has a dedicated friend-only feed. Alison responded that Facebook doesn’t have the motive to do this, as people are simply posting less on the platform.

Day 18: Tuesday, May 13

NYU professor Hemphill resumed his testimony on behalf of the FTC. He noted that, for a period, Meta did not display ads on Instagram Reels, where it competes with platforms like TikTok, but continued placing them in other socially focused areas of the app where it holds a stronger position, according to The Verge. He argued that this strategy would only be viable if Meta were confident users would not leave the platform, suggesting monopolistic power. Hemphill also stated that Meta reduces ad exposure for “needy users” whose engagement drops when they encounter ads, which would not be possible without market dominance.

Hemphill challenged Meta’s insistence that TikTok is a viable competitor, as it beat its own 2024 revenue projection that it would see 78% growth since 2020. He also said that WhatsApp would have most likely had to integrate personal social networking for monetisation purposes if it had not been acquired by Meta, despite its initial hesitation to do so. Hemphill argued that the prevention of this outcome was the only way to justify the high price tag Meta paid for its acquisition.

His final main point was that, while Instagram and WhatsApp already have large user bases under Meta, they are far from perfect. Had they remained independent, they might have delivered better user experiences, such as fewer ads and greater consumer benefits, according to The Verge.

Meta then attempted to undermine Hemphill’s testimony by accusing him of having an “axe to grind” against the company, arguing that he lacks the objectivity expected of an expert witness, according to The Verge. Mark Hansen, Meta’s lead attorney, said Hemphill failed to adequately disclose that, in 2019, he worked with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and former presidential adviser Tim Wu to urge regulators to launch an antitrust investigation into Meta.

Day 17: Monday, May 12

On the first day of the fifth week of the trial, Meta’s CMO Alex Schultz continued his testimony.

He argued that Meta gave Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom “everything he wanted” in terms of staffing a growth team. Still, according to The Verge, Systrom was not receptive to their suggestions until Meta began redistributing them. This goes against what Systrom said on the stand about Meta taking steps to sabotage Instagram’s success after the acquisition.

Schultz added that, while the decision to lessen the promotion of Instagram on Facebook caused a 14% dip in its growth rate, it was still growing and even ultimately recovered.

He also argued that user numbers are no longer the primary measure of competition among social apps; instead, it’s time spent on the platforms. This contradicts the claim that Facebook and Instagram dominate simply because most of the 250 million potential users in the US have already signed up.

Schultz argued that improved content recommendation algorithms — capable of anticipating what users will enjoy before they even realise it — have reduced the role of network effects in growing social apps, weakening the case for Meta as a monopoly.

Next, innovation law professor at New York University, Scott Hemphill, took to the stand for the FTC.

According to The Verge, he said that users feel “frustration” when they don’t see content from friends and family on their social apps, supporting the argument that the quality of Meta’s platforms has declined after locking in users through monopolistic dominance.

Hemphill also noted that users turning to Instagram Reels during the TikTok outage doesn’t constitute solid evidence that it is an adequate substitute.

Day 16: Thursday, May 8

According to The Verge, Thursday’s big name on the stand was Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who provided context on what Instagram’s audience wants out of the app. If the app is social media meant to keep up with friends and family, it competes in a different arena than entertainment apps like YouTube, he said.

Mosseri asserted that connecting with friends, such as interacting in comments, is an important part of using Instagram. Twitter, the FTC is trying to argue, is intended to deliver news and celebrities rather than interactions with friends – so, Twitter’s existence doesn’t argue against Instagram and Facebook establishing a monopoly on online socialisation.

Mosseri said there were internal discussions about Meta embedding Twitter-like social media functionality into Instagram. Instead, Meta eventually spun that functionality out as the app Threads. Ultimately, they decided it would be too confusing to combine both.

Complicating matters is how much social and entertainment apps have changed over the years, with YouTube introducing Shorts and TikTok adding a (little-used) Friends tab. TikTok became one of Meta’s primary competitors, Mosseri said.

Potentially hurting the argument that Instagram has always been about friends is Meta’s attempts to lure high-profile creators. Instagram spent up to $700 million in a given year to attract content creators as average individual users began to post less overall. Meanwhile, the content creator field became “saturated” with people who want even larger audiences.

Later in the day, Meta CMO Alex Schultz testified that Facebook Messager seemed like a more important aspect of the business than ever after the acquisition of WhatsApp – partially because Meta needed to “keep things honest so the deal doesn’t fall through and prove there is competition.”

Days 14 and 15: Tuesday, May 6 and Wednesday, May 7

Meta chief marketing officer Alex Schultz testified, explaining how Meta tracked the rise of other mobile messaging apps. WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart and a FTC expert on social media apps also testified.

Day 13: Monday, May 5

Former Facebook product executive Peter Deng spoke on Monday, saying that while Facebook had anticipated competition from mobile messaging apps in the early 2010s, WhatsApp, which Meta eventually acquired, had not been one of them.

Mobile messaging apps were “the biggest threat to our product that I’ve ever seen in my 5 years here at Facebook,” Deng wrote in an email in 2012, according to The Verge’s coverage. That was in the era when Google tried its own short-lived social media platform, Google+.

WhatsApp was not considered a rival to Facebook because it lacked the “expressive messaging” elements that would have put it on the same footing as a social media service, as opposed to a mobile message and photo-sharing service like iMessage.

Deng worked on Instagram from 2013 to 2015, which is why Meta also brought him to the courtroom to speak against Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom’s assertion that Instagram could have risen to the same level of popularity without Meta. Deng said Meta made a difference in hiring, infrastructure, and sharing growth team staff. However, a chat log between Systrom and Deng showed Instagram’s growth resources may have decreased, not increased, under Meta.

Day 12: Thursday, May 1

Meta’s team presented several arguments to show that its user base remains loyal not out of a lack of alternatives, but because the quality of its products genuinely attracts and retains them. Curtiss Cobb, a research executive, testified that even during backlash over issues such as Cambridge Analytica or changes to its fact-checking policies, users continued to engage because Facebook didn’t alter its core product, according to The Verge.

John Hegeman, Meta’s Chief Revenue Officer, offered several points to demonstrate that Meta users are not bothered by its ad practices, countering the claim that Meta traps users in a poor experience due to its market dominance. He said there was “very little interest” in Meta’s ad-free subscription in Europe, and that when the number of ads shown to some users was reduced by 80%, the company observed only a 3% increase in a usage metric, according to The Verge.

Meta’s team argued that it views TikTok as a competitor, proving it has a broader focus than personal social networking and so cannot monopolise that market. Hegeman said that Facebook shifted its focus to video and other types of content rather than that from friends and family, and that was a better strategy, as per The Verge.

However, Hegeman did acknowledge that Facebook’s user base has still grown despite TikTok’s skyrocketing popularity in the last two years. Former TikTok director of UX research Eric Morrison also testified that the video app “was not necessarily serving that need to connect to people that you already know,” differentiating it from Facebook, according to The Verge.

Day 11: Wednesday, April 30

The court heard from Adam Presser, who leads operations and trust and safety at TikTok. According to The Verge, he argued that the video app does not compete with Meta on personal social networking, handing a point to the FTC. He revealed that users spend only 1% of their time in the Friends tab and barely share their contact lists with TikTok.

Nevertheless, Meta wants to show that it is a key player in markets other than personal social networking and that it faces significant competition from TikTok.

When shown the similar interfaces of TikTok and Instagram Reels, and wording from a March filing TikTok made that described them as “indistinguishable,” Presser said that the apps use different recommendation algorithms. These algorithms make the content they offer users distinct, according to The Verge.

Meta’s attorney countered by showing documentation where TikTok said that YouTube and Instagram are its “most important competitors” and that its users often turn to Instagram when TikTok is down.

Meanwhile, Meta highlighted TikTok’s own admission, made in court filings related to its potential US ban, that creating a standalone, US-only version of its app could take years if not for parent company ByteDance. Meta argued this shows how large companies, like itself, are needed by smaller apps, like Instagram, to grow their infrastructure and moderation capabilities as they scale up. The ultimate point being that Instagram wouldn’t have succeeded without the acquisition, so the goal was never to block competition.

After proceedings ended for the day, the US House Judiciary Committee unexpectedly dropped a provision from its budget package that would have stripped the FTC of its antitrust authority and transferred it to the Justice Department.

Day 10: Tuesday, April 29

The main developments on Day 10 centered on testimony from Meta COO Javier Olivan. The FTC is seeking to prove that Facebook primarily operates as a personal social networking platform and therefore competes only with apps offering similar functionalities. However, according to The Verge, Olivan testified that a small portion of Facebook users have no connections on the platform at all.

The FTC also claims to show Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp was a strategic move to neutralise an emerging threat to its Messenger app. As evidence, the agency cited a 2012 email in which Olivan instructed staff to collect data on the rise of competing messaging apps adding social features; material he said he planned to present to executives to argue that the company should “double down on Messenger.” Internal communications also revealed his concerns that Messenger might “not be around in a couple … years from now” and that he was opposed to allowing rival messaging apps to advertise on Facebook.

Nevertheless, Olivan testified that Meta did not buy WhatsApp because it was concerned about it evolving into a social network app, despite meticulously tracking its growth in 2012 and 2013, according to The Verge. He added that while he feared Google might acquire WhatsApp, there was a “huge chain of ifs” before the app could realistically become a serious competitor in the social space.

The FTC further argued that the minimal impact of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook’s user base, an outcome Olivan acknowledged, underscores the company’s immense market power and its ability to sustain dominance, according to The Verge.

Olivan also asserted that Meta had no intention of shuttering Instagram after acquiring it. He cited a 2012 internal email in which he noted that Instagram’s founders were struggling to “barely… keep the site up & running” amid a post-acquisition surge in signups. He also offered suggestions on how to keep it growing, like by helping with translations and analytics.

The trial then shifted its focus to comparing Meta’s products to iMessage. The FTC said that iMessage doesn’t automatically create user profiles for people you haven’t already added, differentiating it from Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s team countered this by arguing that Apple’s messenger app is listed on the App Store under social networking, so it is a competitor, according to The Verge.

Olivan argued that the feature which automatically adds a user’s friends is actually common among many social apps. As such, he claimed, Facebook’s network effects, where its large user base attracts even more users, do not constitute a unique advantage capable of enabling monopolistic control.

Day 9: Monday, April 28

Executives from several major social media platforms testified in support of the FTC’s argument that Facebook and Instagram are not their direct competitors. If Meta’s apps are determined to operate in a distinct category from other social media giants, it would strengthen the case that Meta holds a monopoly over the market for personal social networking services.

Firstly, X VP of Product Keith Coleman said that he “didn’t know who wrote” that X is a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected” in the X Help Centre, and that it’s a  “pretty wacky” description, according to The Verge. He reiterated this by saying that a 2015 survey where nearly a third of US social media users said they come to Twitter to keep up with friends and family “predates” Twitter’s current focus on helping people connect with their interests.

Furthermore, a 2018 email from ex-CEO Jack Dorsey said that he wanted Twitter to “focus on (its) strength of interest network” rather than host personal conversations as “there’s already a service out there that does personal network well.”

Former VP of connected partnerships at Strava Mateo Ortega said that his app is “all about fitness and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” but he did admit that Facebook and Instagram “can compete for content related to workouts,” according to The Verge.

Reddit executive Winter Raymond said that use of pseudonyms is important to its users, demonstrating that the app is not about connecting them with people they know in real life. Pinterest’s former director of product management Julia Roberts said that people and “following” are not a big part of the lifestyle app’s experience. Nevertheless, in a 2017 competitive assessment, Pinterest noted a “rapid increase in customer overlap” with Instagram and that it was even “replicating” some of its own features, per The Verge.

Representatives from cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure also testified, explaining how their services help digital companies to scale up at a relatively low cost, according to The Verge. This point supports the FTC’s argument that Instagram could have grown to its current size without relying on Meta’s infrastructure.

Day 8: Thursday, April 24

The court heard from FTC’s in-house financial analyst, Kevin Hearle, and former TikTok executive, Blake Chandlee, over a video link. TechRepublic will update this article when more information becomes publicly available.

Day 7: Wednesday, April 23

Dirk Stoop, Meta’s former product manager for Facebook Camera, gave evidence on the seventh day of the trial. The FTC hopes to prove that Meta created the app only to compete with Instagram and lost interest in it after the acquisition.

In an internal note from January 2012, Stoop wrote that “Instagram is growing quickly,” so getting Facebook Camera “out the door fast is a huge priority,” according to The Verge. Another document was produced in May 2012 that lists “messages to avoid” in Facebook Camera’s promotion and includes “Facebook Camera launches filters, like Instagram” and “Facebook squashes competition.”

Nevertheless, Stoop stood by his former employer. He said the messaging choices were to ensure the press didn’t pigeonhole Camera, and that it and Instagram were designed with distinct purposes in mind; the former for sharing solely among friends and family, the latter for broader social discovery.

Stoop added that Facebook continued to grow the Camera team for two years after acquiring Instagram, showing that the goal wasn’t to compete, but simply to provide a fast, fun way to upload multiple photos to Facebook. Eventually, Camera’s features were integrated with the Facebook app so existing users didn’t need to download a separate app to enjoy its benefits.

The FTC then brought up another expert witness, Professor Cliff Lampe, whose research covers human-computer interactions and social media. He said he categorises Facebook and Instagram as “personal social networking,” distinguishing them from platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn. The two apps “enable mass personal, low-cost maintenance of relationships with broad networks of real-life personal connections,” he said, according to MLex.

This supports the FTC’s point that, despite the comparable popularity of other social apps, Facebook and Instagram dominate in their own lane to the extent that it could be considered monopolistic.

Day 6: Tuesday, April 22

The court heard from one person on Day 6: former Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. He testified for the FTC, arguing that Instagram could have grown independently of Meta, and that Zuckerberg’s company even took steps to sabotage its success after the acquisition.

According to The Verge, Systrom described Instagram’s growth at launch as “exponential, unstoppable,” and that the first slowdown it experienced “was maybe a year into being at Facebook.” He claimed that, before the acquisition, he was considering adding video, messaging, and photo tagging features to his app, and that he’d pitched a mock-up of an ad model that looked “exactly what you see…today.”

Zuckerberg got a “screaming deal” by purchasing Instagram for a billion dollars, as it has since “generated many multiples of that price and then some,” according to Systrom. Nevertheless, he admitted that the app’s probability of failing without Meta’s intervention was “low,” but not zero.

Systrom denied that Meta improved Instagram by making it safer and more reliable, according to The Verge. Instagram was already staying online and managing spam and problematic content prior to the acquisition, and Meta gave it “zero” of the trust and security headcount it acquired post-Cambridge Analytica. Even after Meta created a centralised integrity team for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Systrom deemed it insufficient and created his own team.

Systrom said Meta set Instagram up to fail by withdrawing members of Meta’s growth team who had been dedicated to supporting Instagram post-acquisition, removing Instagram-Facebook integrations that solely benefited Instagram, and allowing a spat with Twitter to lead to Twitter restricting Instagram’s access to its API. He said that Zuckerberg “was not investing in Instagram” because he saw it as a threat to Facebook, according to The Verge.

Day 5: Monday, April 21

On Monday, the court heard from Jihoon Rim, a management professor at New York University and former CEO of the messaging app Kakao, as an expert witness for the FTC. He described WhatsApp and Instagram’s pre-acquisition growth as “exceptional,” and that WhatsApp’s lead investor noted it received more engagement than Facebook, according to The Verge.

Rim argued WhatsApp would have eventually moved into social networking on its own for the purpose of monetisation through ads, as its subscription model wasn’t sustainable. He presented a note from Morgan Stanley that stated, if WhatsApp collaborated with Google, it “could create the predominant social network on Mobile.” All of this undermines Meta’s narrative that the acquisitions didn’t harm competition.

On the other hand, Neeraj Arora, who worked on Google’s acquisition offer for WhatsApp in the early 2010s before joining the app, said that ads were “not even a discussion point” when questioned by Meta’s attorney, according to The Verge.

Before closing the session for the day, a recorded interview with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha revealed that he believed the investment firm would have been able to help Instagram scale as it has done, but without Meta. He said that he was “giddy” to invest in such a promising app, but that “it wasn’t obvious you could make a great return” on a billion-dollar acquisition, per The Verge.

This supports the FTC’s case by suggesting Instagram could have succeeded without Meta’s resources, and that the high price tag may have been more about eliminating a competitive threat than making a sound investment.

Day 4: Thursday, April 17

Sandberg spoke at length on Thursday, reiterating that TikTok gave Meta fierce competition. Specifically, TikTok’s rise correlated with a decrease in Instagram’s revenue. She defended Meta’s practice of including ads, asserting ads don’t hurt the user experience. Notably, a slide revealed that Facebook had considered a paid, ad-free model in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The FTC called Jim Goetz, an investor in WhatsApp from Sequoia Capital. He explained that WhatsApp had seen Facebook as a competitor and had not seen Apple’s iMessage as a competitor. The FTC was trying to illustrate that WhatsApp could have thrived without Meta acquiring it, according to The Verge.

Day 3: Wednesday, April 16

Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s “growth slowed down dramatically” when TikTok became popular, reiterating how the social media platform is not the only dominant player in the market, according to The Verge.

He also didn’t consider acquiring TikTok’s precursor, Musical.ly, as he didn’t want to deal with “any connection that they had to China.” ByteDance subsequently acquired it and became a major competitor, the CEO said.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that competition is now coming from YouTube, too, as “richer forms of media” like video have become more attractive to digital creators, per CNN. However, the platform is not considered a competitor in the market that the FTC has defined.

The FTC argued that Facebook gained disproportionate influence from “network effects,” as its large, sustained user base encourages new users to join and existing users to stay, since much of their social circle is already on the platform.

However, Zuckerberg argued that network effects aren’t solely beneficial. He explained that users may eventually see their feeds dominated by content from people they no longer care about, making the platform obsolete. This is why he considered resetting everyone’s Friends lists.

Regarding WhatsApp, Zuckerberg said that the motivation behind its acquisition was never to hinder its growth and prevent it from challenging Meta’s dominance, because he knew that the founders had no plans to do so. After getting to know them, he found they “looked down” on adding features that could make the app more competitive and eventually had to persuade them to implement those changes.

Ex-Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg came to the stand near the end of the session and said she was shaken when Google Plus was launched in 2011, noting how it was “almost an exact replica” of Facebook.

Day 2: Tuesday, April 15

Zuckerberg was asked to explain why, in a February 2012 exchange, he agreed with CFO David Ebersman’s suggestion that acquiring Instagram could help “neutralize a potential competitor,” according to The Verge. On the stand, he said that buying a company will inherently result in a competitor being taken off the market.

He also admitted that he could have built a new app to compete with Instagram, but “whether it would have succeeded or not … is a matter of speculation,” according to the BBC. In an email sent before Instagram’s acquisition, Zuckerberg said that Meta was “so far behind” in the photo-sharing space and that the prospect of falling behind was “really scary,” per Mashable.

Nevertheless, his company did start building the competing product Facebook Camera, after, in 2011, he was more focused on Instagram’s camera technology than its social potential. Zuckerberg then realised that his app would not catch up with Instagram, so he scrapped it and pursued acquisition.

In court, the CEO admitted he was “worried” about other messaging apps like WeChat from “broadly competing with (Meta)” before it acquired WhatsApp. The statement was in response to messages from January 2013, in which Zuckerberg suggested “block(ing) WeChat, Kakao and Line ads” as they “are trying to build social networks and replace us,” per The Verge.

The second day of the trial illuminated several of Zuckerberg’s ideas to expand his company, which never came to fruition. One was buying Snapchat, now Snap, for a proposed $6 billion. The Facebook founder was particularly concerned when Snapchat released Stories, saying in internal messages from 2014 that it was “now more of a competitor for Instagram and News Feed than it ever was for messaging.”

He also considered creating a Facebook feed that shows only ads, deleting all users’ Facebook Friends to regain its “cultural relevance,” and spinning out Instagram into its own company. The latter was pre-empting the regulatory scrutiny his company is currently under, as in a 2018 email, he admitted that “most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up.”

Day 1: Monday, April 14

The most significant points discussed on the first day centred around TikTok. While the FTC wants to prove that Meta has monopolised the market of social apps that “connect friends and family,” it does not include TikTok in that market.

Meta argued that the Chinese video-sharing app should be seen as a viable competitor that holds comparable market value, according to The Verge. For instance, when TikTok was banned in the US for one day in January 2025, Facebook and Instagram usage spiked by 20% and 17%, respectively. If Zuckerberg can prove that the FTC’s market definition is too narrow, Meta could win the case.

The courts also heard that, in February 2012, Zuckerberg considered acquiring Instagram but did not make any significant changes to avoid creating “a hole in the market for someone else to fill.” Nevertheless, per The Verge, the CEO said he never took this route.

TechnologyAdvice staff writer Megan Crouse contributed to this report.