Mark Zuckerberg once thought of deleting everyone’s Facebook friends, court documents reveal | Technology News
Meta’s horical anti-trust trial, which could force the tech giant to break off Instagram and WhatsApp, started earlier this week. On Monday, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the witness stand, the Federal Trade Commission shared various emails in evidence. According to Fortune, it included an email sent in 2022 from Mark Zuckerberg where he pitched the idea of deleting everyone’s Facebook friends and having users rebuild their networks from scratch.
“Option 1. Double on Friending. One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start over again.”
With Instagram taking over Facebook in the last few years as the go to social media platform for teenagers, it looks like the Meta CEO wanted to increase user engagement deleting exing connections and rebuilding their network from scratch.
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However, the idea soon was scrutinised many including Facebook head Tom Alison, who responded to Zuckerberg, writing “I’m not sure Option #1 in your proposal (Double-down on Friending) would be viable given my understanding of how vital the friend use case is to IG.”
Reportedly, Meta boss also came up with an idea of shifting Facebook from a friend based model to a follower based model. While these proposals never saw the light of day, these internal emails give an insight of how Meta wants to stay relevant in the ever evolving digital world.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has been building up a case against Meta for the last few years. Filed in 2020 during Trump’s first term as the President, the FTC says Meta has been maintaining an illegal monopoly in the social media market.
In its complaint, FTC accused Facebook of actively neutralising “perceived competitive threats” and said that when Meta was “unable to maintain its monopoly fairly competing, the company’s executives addressed the exential threat buying up new innovators that were succeeding where Facebook failed.”
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