WASHINGTON—Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social media giant Meta Platforms, testified in federal court on April 14 as part of a trial in which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) attempted to convince a judge that his company violated antitrust law.
Zuckerberg appeared at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse in Washington after opening arguments in which FTC attorney Daniel Matheson accused the company of engaging in anticompetitive conduct that harmed consumers. It’s part of a longstanding lawsuit that the federal government brought against the company during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Zuckerberg fielded questions about internal and external communications involving Zuckerberg and his vision for the company. Toward the end of the trial’s first day, on April 14, Matheson probed Zuckerberg’s memory of communications that he sent leading up to Meta’s buying Instagram in 2012 and how it handled a competitor photos app that it was developing.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing the case, asked Zuckerberg to explain to him how the stories function on Facebook worked. Zuckerberg explained that people could receive stories from individuals whom they followed on the platform, even if they weren’t friends. At one point, Zuckerberg attempted to explain to Boasberg the difference between HTML 5, a programming language that he said his company mistakenly relied on, and Native apps.
The case could have major consequences for the social media space. In a complaint filed in 2021, the FTC asked for a judgment that would require Meta’s divestiture of assets, including “Instagram and/or WhatsApp.” It comes amid a series of other major antitrust actions in the United States and Europe. As Meta’s trial began, Google was working its way toward a remedy in its antitrust case in Washington.
A federal judge in Washington held that Google violated the Sherman Act in the general search services market. Separately, the Department of Justice told a federal judge in Virginia in 2024 that the company was liable for violating antitrust law with its advertising technology practices. The judgment in that case has yet to be released.
During his opening remarks in the Meta case, Matheson accused the company of acquiring its competition in Instagram and WhatsApp rather than competing with them. With Meta’s purported monopoly power, he said, consumers lacked reasonable alternatives for interacting with people in their lives. Matheson also emphasized Facebook’s interest in connecting friends. Zuckerberg said that while connecting friends was at the core of what the company did, it had come to focus more on connecting people to outside interests.
Attorney Mark Hansen, who represented Meta, said that the FTC was wrong to claim that his client maintained monopoly power by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. The intent and effect were to benefit U.S. consumers, he said. Hansen said that consumers saw benefits from Meta’s activities and that the quality of Meta’s apps had improved.
To argue that Meta didn’t act like a monopolist, he noted that the company didn’t charge anything to use its service.
Hansen also suggested that the FTC misdefined the relevant market and failed to consider the competition that TikTok brought to Meta. Both TikTok and YouTube, he said, served as substitutes that people could go to instead of Meta. One of his slides showed screenshots of a video of singer Michael Jackson on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts while noting how similar each looked to the other on a smartphone.
