Additional, Meta argued that the FTC didn’t present proof that customers sharing friends-and-family content material had been proven extra advertisements. Meta famous that it “doesn’t revenue by displaying extra advertisements to customers who don’t click on on them,” so it solely reveals extra advertisements to customers who click on advertisements.
Meta additionally insisted that there is “nothing however hypothesis” displaying that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been higher off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them.
The corporate claimed that with out Meta’s sources, Instagram could have died off. Meta famous that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was “fairly damaged and duct-taped” collectively, making it “susceptible to spam” earlier than Meta purchased it.
Moderately than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram might be thought of “a consumer-welfare bonanza,” Meta argued, whereas dismissing “smoking gun” emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing shopping for Instagram to bury it as “legally irrelevant.”
Dismissing these as “just a few dated emails,” Meta argued that “efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg’s way of thinking earlier than the acquisition in 2012 are pointless.”
“What issues is what Meta did,” Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with sources that allowed it “to ‘thrive’—including many new options, attracting tons of of thousands and thousands after which billions of customers, and monetizing with nice success.”
Within the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that no one thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their objective was to by no means add social options, preferring to supply a easy, clear messaging app. And Meta disputed any declare that it feared Google would possibly purchase WhatsApp as the idea for making a Fb rival, arguing that “the only real Meta witness to (supposedly) study of Google’s acquisition efforts testified that he didn’t have that fear.”
