New court filing shows that Meta execs agreed that Facebook was losing to TikTok

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other Meta execs thought that TikTok was beating Meta at its own game. That’s according to a new filing in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, published on Monday. The document, dated February 2022, includes conversations among a number of Meta execs discussing Facebook and Instagram’s strategy and market position. In one message, Zuckerberg called Facebook a “challenger” that has “lost the mindshare and momentum,” while adding that TikTok creates a “feeling of shared context” where friends see the same memes, he said. Mosseri also agreed that Facebook should be thought of as a challenger now, noting it’s no longer the default discovery engine. He proposed that the preferred discovery engine today could be YouTube, but he expected TikTok to surpass the Google-owned video platform in time, given the data Meta had on hand. “The most natural differentiated … strategy for Facebook is to ... Read full article.