A new document from a US lawsuit against Meta says that important people at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, thought TikTok was better than Meta at the things Meta is good at.

A document from February 2022 shows talks between some Meta leaders about Facebook and Instagram's plans and place in the market. In one message, Zuckerberg said Facebook was a "challenger" that had "lost popularity and progress." He added that TikTok creates a "feeling of shared context," where friends see the same popular online content.

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

Mosseri wrote that Facebook's best plan is to be the main place where people find things online. But he thought it was interesting that TikTok, which only has videos, is doing much better than Facebook. He thought TikTok is making the social mobile market larger and also taking viewers from TV, long videos, and Netflix.

Mosseri was correct. In 2021, a study showed that people in the U.S. spent more time on average watching TikTok than YouTube. Another study in 2023 found that children aged four to eighteen spent 60% more time on TikTok than on YouTube. Last year, TikTok started allowing videos up to 60 minutes long, trying to compete with YouTube.

Just this week, Netflix added a feature like TikTok to its mobile app. It shows a new vertical video feed of suggested videos, chosen for each user.

In the trial, the US government is trying to show that Meta broke competition rules. They say Meta bought companies like Instagram and WhatsApp to become the only big social media company. A document like this could hurt their case because, inside Meta, leaders were talking about how much TikTok was beating Facebook.

For example, Zuckerberg said that even though Facebook had the most daily or weekly users, people were spending less time on it compared to other apps.

He also mentioned that TikTok can give people a feeling of shared understanding. He said that if you and your friends like the same things, you will probably see the same content in your TikTok feeds.

This makes it social because you don't need to send things to a friend; you can just assume they've seen it,

Several other executives also contributed their perspectives.

WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart said that when TikTok users comment on videos about a certain topic, the app's system will show them and other users who commented on those videos more videos like them over time.

Stan Chudnovsky, who was a vice president at Meta, said that Meta was now competing in an area that was divided, and several companies were reducing their growth.

He said that just adding a new format, like Stories, is not enough now. This is because people have many other popular social media apps they can use in the U.S., such as TikTok, Twitter, iMessage, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.

John Hegeman, who was in charge of advertising and is now in charge of sales, agreed that TikTok was clearly ahead in areas like short videos, how things are ranked, and tools for making content. But he thought Meta could catch up if creators also posted their videos on Reels.

However, he wasn't sure how far behind Meta was with the technology and tools for making things. The document suggests that Meta thinks Facebook is not as strong as others in the social media market.

This is not the only document that has appeared in the trial to show that Meta is afraid of competition. Last month, Zuckerberg himself said that TikTok's success was a risk to Meta's business and had made it grow more slowly.