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 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.
