Mark Zuckerberg once suggested spinning out Instagram as a solution to its ‘cannibalization’ of Facebook

Summary

In an internal email surfaced as part of the Meta antitrust trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fretted about the potential that the company’s Instagram acquisition may cannibalize Facebook. Were that to happen, it could lead to the “network collapse of the more engaging and profitable product,” a worried Zuckerberg told other Meta executives in a confidential message. Zuckerberg proposed multiple ways to prevent this cannibalization from occurring, including building more bridges between Meta’s apps to make them function as a single network (suggesting that Instagram was contributing to Facebook’s loss of cultural relevance). He also openly wondered if Facebook would be better served by spinning out Instagram as a separate business. In its trial against Meta, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is attempting to prove that the company is operating a social networking monopoly and that its acquisition of competing apps like Instagram and WhatsApp allowed it to maintain its dominant position in the market. As evidence, the prosecution is surfacing emails and other messages that indicate that Zuckerberg understood the threat Instagram posed to Facebook, even after it became a part of Meta’s larger family of apps. In an email dated May 2018, Zuckerberg explained to other Facebook executives — including Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, now former COO Sheryl Sandberg, former CTO Mike Schroepfer, former Chief Growth Officer (now COO) Javier Olivan, and former CFO David Wehner — that he was concerned the company’s approach to its family of apps was not correct. Instagram hurt Facebook’s growth Image Credits:Chesnot / Getty Images Specifically, Zuckerberg was worried that Instagram’s growth could hurt Facebook itself, saying that internal data shows that when users joined Instagram, their Facebook engagement “declines significantly.” “We are starting to get more data that suggests this hollowing out of Facebook usage compounds as a larger percent of the population gets ...