Washington, DC—In response to opening arguments in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Meta, which included testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement.

“The factual dispute on the first day of trial was between 2012 Mark Zuckerberg and 2025 Mark Zuckerberg. In 2012, Zuckerberg admitted to purchasing Instagram to ‘neutralize’ a rival that threatened Facebook’s growth. In 2025, the same Mark Zuckerberg would have us believe his 2012 counterpart was a liar,” said Lee Hepner,  Senior Legal Council at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Zuckerberg also seems to disagree with his own company’s rationale for existence. He repeatedly talked about Facebook and Instagram as platforms for connecting with family and friends, but would now have the judge believe that core use case never mattered. Could the real Mark Zuckerberg — and the real Facebook — please stand up?”

Economic Liberties’ key moments from day one of trial:

• On the stand, Zuckerberg claimed that he’s not sure what a social graph means, and that “the friend part has gone down quite a bit,” in an attempt to emphasize competition with TikTok. An exhibit from the FTC contradicted this claim by demonstrating that the Facebook sign up page identifies the simple reason why users create an account: ”to connect with friends & family.” The FTC also presented an announcement from Zuckerberg in January 2018 talking about changes to emphasize ‘meaningful social interactions’ on Facebook. Future evidence is expected to include TikTok head of operations Adam Presser saying that Facebook’s “social graph” was a “core differentiated feature.”
• Zuckerberg admitted that the launch of the Google+ social network in 2011 was significant for Facebook because it was direct competition in friends and family networking: “Facebook’s major differentiator is friends; my friends are on Facebook so I don’t need to go anywhere else.”
• The FTC displayed a post by Zuckerberg in which he discusses how to beat a potential rival called Path, which cuts to “the core of what we’re trying to do around identity and friend sharing.”
• An internal Meta doc displayed by the FTC read: “Facebook, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor coexist in the U.S. with similar userbases but orthogonal graphs: Facebook connects friends and family, LinkedIn connects coworkers, Nextdoor connects neighbors.”
• In 2022, Zuckerberg wrote that “Friend sharing has always been important to both FB and IG.” When asked about the email on the stand, he called friend sharing a smaller part of Instagram.
• Another FTC showed Zuckerberg saying: “For the network piece, one concerning trend is that a huge number of people are using Instagram every day . . . even FB employees — and they’re only uploading some of their photos to FB.”
• Judge Boasberg appeared to agree with the FTC that friends and family social networking is a definite market dominated by Meta. “Given the record evidence the court has just summarized, a reasonable fact finder could determine that Meta has such a ‘core use’ of “friends-and-family sharing and exploits a customer base seeking out that use.”
• The FTC displayed an internal email from Zuckerberg clearly showing that he viewed Instagram as a competitive threat: “If Instagram continues to kick ass on mobile or if Google buys them, then over the next few years they could easily add pieces of their service that copy what we’re doing now. . . . I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.”
• In another email, Zuckerberg wrote “[W]e’d be very behind in both functionality and brand on how one of the core use cases of Facebook will evolve in the mobile world, which is really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.”
• After the Instagram acquisition was completed, in a 2012 email to Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg wrote: “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”

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Learn more about Facebook and Meta’s abuses here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.