According to a new document in a U.S. lawsuit, important people at Meta, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, believed that TikTok was more successful than Meta in the same areas.

The document from February 2022 has talks between some Meta managers about Facebook and Instagram's plans and their place in the market. In one message, Zuckerberg said Facebook was a competitor that had "lost people's interest and speed." He also said TikTok makes a "feeling of shared experience" because friends see the same popular content.

Mosseri agreed that Facebook is now a competitor, saying it's not the main way people find things anymore. He suggested YouTube might be the main way people find things now, but he thought TikTok would become more popular than YouTube later, based on the information Meta had.

Mosseri wrote that the best way for Facebook to be different is to be the first place people look for things online. However, he found it interesting that TikTok, which only has videos, is much more successful than Facebook. He guessed that TikTok is helping the social media market grow and taking customers from TV, long videos, and Netflix.

Mosseri was correct. According to one study, TikTok had more average watch time than YouTube in the U.S. in 2021. Another study showed that in 2023, young people spent 60% more time on TikTok compared to YouTube. Last year, TikTok started allowing users to upload videos up to 60 minutes long to compete with YouTube.

This week, Netflix added a new feature to its mobile app, similar to TikTok. It shows short videos in a vertical format, suggesting videos based on what you like.

However, in the trial, the U.S. government is trying to show that Meta broke competition laws when it bought companies like Instagram and WhatsApp. They say Meta did this to create a social networking monopoly. A document like this could hurt their case because inside Meta, leaders were talking about how much TikTok was doing better than Facebook.

For example, Zuckerberg said that while Facebook was still the biggest app for daily or weekly users, people were spending less time on it.

He also mentioned that TikTok can give people a feeling of shared experiences, explaining that friends with similar interests will probably see the same content on their TikTok feeds.

"This makes it social because you can just assume your friends have seen the content, so you don't have to send it to them," the CEO said. "It would be great if we could do this with different topics and content on FB."

Other executives also contributed to the discussion.

Will Cathcart, who is in charge of WhatsApp, said that when TikTok users comment on videos about a certain topic, the app's system will show them and other people who commented the same videos more often.

Stan Chudnovsky, who was a Vice President and General Manager at Meta, said that Meta was now competing in a market with many different companies, and these companies were reducing Meta's growth.

He explained that just adding something new, like Stories, is not enough now. He said this is because people use many other social media apps, such as TikTok, Twitter, iMessage, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.

John Hegeman, who was the head of advertising and is now in charge of making money, agreed that TikTok was clearly the best at short videos, helping people find content, and tools for making videos. But he said he thought Meta could become as good if creators also put their videos on Reels.

However, he wasn't sure how far behind Meta was with its technology and tools. The document suggests that Meta thinks Facebook is not doing well in the social media market.

This document is not the only one that has appeared in the trial to show Meta is afraid of competition. Zuckerberg also said last month that TikTok's success was a danger to Meta and made it grow more slowly.