Mark Zuckerberg Testifies That He’s So Over Facebook Friends

Meta has long described its products as enabling people “to connect and share with friends and family.” It’s one of the few things about the ever-evolving social networking giant that has remained unchanged over the years.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to walk that all back.

During his testimony Monday in a high stakes antitrust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, Zuckerberg argued that the Facebook friend, once the currency of the company’s global user base, is no longer Meta’s bread and butter. Instead, according to Politico, he said that Meta has morphed into “more of a broad discovery-entertainment space.” Zuckerberg testified that just 20% of the content people consume on Facebook and 10% of content they see on Instagram is from their friends, Reuters reported. “The vast majority of the experience is more around exploring your interests, entertainment, things like that,” he explained. “That’s kind of just been the trend the whole history of the company.”

Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the era of the Facebook friend is over—or at least, that it’s quickly coming to an end—was no accident. The FTC’s case relies on the idea that Meta monopolized the “personal social networking” market and that it allegedly bought both Instagram and WhatsApp to choke off two competitors in that market, a claim that Zuckerberg denied on Monday.

The FTC wants the court to force Meta to divest from both apps. But the “personal” part of the FTC’s argument is crucial. One reason the FTC can argue Meta has an illegal monopoly in the market is because it’s not considering TikTok and YouTube to be competitors. Those platforms, the government argues, don’t connect users to people they know the way Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp do.

On Monday, the FTC’s lawyer insisted that this is the company’s “core value proposition.” Indeed, as recently as 2021, Facebook insisted that “the majority (57%) of posts that people see is from their family and friends,” by way of dismissing claims that polarizing political content dominated people’s feeds.

But during his testimony, Zuckerberg repeatedly rebuffed the FTC’s characterization. In one 2022 email presented during the trial, the Facebook founder even suggested nuking users’ entire friend networks and starting over, Insider reported.

The truth is, over the last few years, Meta has more or less given up on real world connections as the central connective tissue between its billions of users. It’s just rarely been so blunt about it. In 2022, when the company began infusing users’ Instagram feeds with videos from accounts they don’t follow, the backlash, including from celebrity power users like Kylie Jenner, was fierce, prompting the platform to temporarily roll back some changes.

But Meta has continued to move in that direction, prioritizing content “discovery” over real-world connections as it races to catch up to TikTok. Users’ feeds today now brim with some combination of creator content, AI slop, and ads, ads, and more ads. One can quibble with whether that’s good for users. But from a legal standpoint, it’s undoubtedly good for Meta. By distancing itself from the very premise that once defined his company, Zuckerberg is undermining a central pillar of the FTC’s case. Facebook may have been in the business of connecting friends, but Meta is over it.