Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in federal court on Monday to defend his company against the FTC’s allegations that it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to create a social media monopoly.
Bloomberg reports that on the first day of a highly anticipated trial that has been years in the making, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stand to face questions from the FTC regarding the company’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012. The FTC argues that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, bought its way to a social networking monopoly by acquiring Instagram and later WhatsApp.
During his testimony, which lasted over three hours, Zuckerberg was forced to revisit a time when he doubted Facebook’s ability to compete in the mobile photo-sharing market. The FTC’s lead trial lawyer, Daniel Matheson, presented emails from 2010 to 2012 showing Zuckerberg’s concerns about Facebook falling behind Instagram in the mobile app boom. In one email from June 2011, Zuckerberg stated that Facebook needed to “get their act together quickly” to catch up with Instagram.
The FTC alleges that Meta’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp were “killer acquisitions” designed to eliminate competition and maintain a monopoly in the social media market. Matheson argued that after acquiring Instagram, Meta “fundamentally manipulated the experience” offered by the service to avoid cannibalizing its own more profitable Facebook product, a decision that “offends the policy” of antitrust laws.
The FTC believes that Zuckerberg was specifically seeking to take out rival social media sites focused on connecting with friends and family. Zuckerberg testified that while friends and family are an important component of Facebook, they are not the only focus. He said, “we’ve always been a service that lets you discover and learn about what’s going on in the world.”
Meta has pushed back against the FTC’s claims, with its lawyer Mark Hansen arguing that the company faces intense competition from a variety of platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, iMessage, and X (formerly Twitter). Hansen pointed out that consumer usage of social media apps has changed significantly over time, with less than 20 percent of Meta customers using the services for communicating with friends and family in 2025.
In their opening argument, Meta’s lawyers said that, “This case is a grab bag of FTC theories at war with the facts and the law.” They added, “the FTC’s entire case consists of convincing the Court that Instagram doesn’t compete with TikTok. Which makes no sense.”
If the FTC prevails in the case, it could result in a spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp, undoing years of integration between the apps and potentially erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta’s market value. The trial is expected to last about two months and will feature testimony from former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg in addition to Zuckerberg.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
