Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is more likely to follow creators and influencers on Instagram and X than on Facebook, emails used as evidence in the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust lawsuit against Meta has revealed. The emails, a part of communication between Zuckerberg and Meta’s head of Facebook Tom Alison in April 2022, also revealed Meta’s concerns about Facebook. According to it, Zuckerberg has been worried about the social network’s cultural relevance for years.
“Even though the FB app’s engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly and I worry that this may be a leading indicator of future health issues,” Business Insider quoted him from the emails.
Zuckerberg also even shared that his own habits had shifted as he was more likely to follow surfers or MMA fighters on Instagram or Twitter. “Every other modern social network is built on following rather than friending, so it seems possible that the FB app is just outdated because it never adopted this fundamental innovation,” he said, hinting that the core experience of Facebook may be losing popularity because of its reliance on “friending” rather than the more modern “following” model.
“I’m optimistic about community messaging, but after running at groups in FB for several years, I’m not sure how much further we’ll be able to push this,” he wrote. “It’s possible groups will just never be as big as friending/following, and that a lot of group behavior is moving to messaging anyway.”
In his discussion with Alison, the Meta CEO added that even if Instagram and WhatsApp did well, he didn’t see a path to success for Meta if Facebook faltered.
“Differentiating between IG and FB is important, but I think we need to find a strategy that doesn’t leave one service picking up the scraps the other service leaves behind or having either service artificially or unreasonably constrain itself,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Right now IG is doing well on cultural relevance and FB isn’t, so I’m more focused on figuring out a reasonable path for FB longer term.”