‘Really Scary’: Mark Zuckerberg’s Old Emails Resurface as Antitrust Trial Kicks Off 

Key Takeaways

• Meta is on trial for allegedly operating a social media monopoly.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified on the first day of the trial.
• The Federal Trade Commission presented internal emails in which Zuckerberg expressed concern about the threat Instagram posed to Facebook.

On the first day of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) lawsuit against Meta, the prosecution focused on the firm’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012.

FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson depicted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as feeling threatened by the rise of Instagram, which he described at the time as “really scary” in internal emails shown to the court.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram Emails Shown in Court

The emails submitted as evidence include a back-and-forth between Zuckerberg and David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer at the time, the New York Times reports .

In the exchange, Zuckerberg explained that he was interested in acquiring Instagram for two reasons: to “neutralize competition” and to incorporate its “social dynamics” into Facebook.

“We really need to get our act together quickly on this since Instagram’s growing so fast,” he wrote in another internal message shown to the court.

FTC Builds Monopoly Case

During the trial, Matheson sought to align Zuckerberg’s emails with the FTC’s narrative that Meta used buyouts to remove rivals from the equation and cement its own platforms’ dominance.

Meta’s leadership decided “that competition was too hard, and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he argued in court.

While Monday’s session mostly zoomed in on Instagram, Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp will also be scrutinized in the coming days and weeks.

A Market-Defining Case

To build its antitrust case, the FTC must prove that Meta has monopolized the market for “personal social networking services.”

However, the regulator has had to make some notable exclusions from its definition to depict Meta as a monopoly.

For instance, if YouTube and TikTok are considered part of the same market, it is difficult to argue that Meta doesn’t face competition—a factor that Meta’s lawyers intend to incorporate into their defense.

“The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others,” the firm said in a pretrial statement.