A recent disclosure within the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust litigation against Meta Platforms Inc., made public on Monday, indicates a prevailing sentiment among Meta's senior leadership, notably CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, that TikTok was effectively eclipsing Meta within its established domain.

Dating from February 2022, the document encapsulates exchanges amongst a multitude of Meta executives deliberating the strategic trajectory and market standing of Facebook and Instagram, wherein, in one missive, Zuckerberg posited Facebook as a "challenger" that had "ceded mindshare and momentum", while concurrently asserting that TikTok engenders a "sense of shared context" through the homologous consumption of memetic content amongst peers.

Mosseri further concurred that Facebook ought now to be conceived as a challenger, observing its cessation as the ubiquitous discovery engine, and posited that the current pre-eminent discovery engine might reside with YouTube, anticipating, however, that TikTok would, in due course, eclipse the Google-owned video platform, grounded in the extensive data corpus available to Meta.

"The ostensibly most intuitive differentiation stratagem for Facebook resides in establishing itself as the paramount discovery interface; however, it is noteworthy that [TikTok], operating exclusively through video, is comprehensively outperforming us," Mosseri articulated. "My conjecture is that they are not only expanding the ambit of the social mobile market but also progressively encroaching upon television, long-format video, and even platforms like Netflix."

Mosseri's prescient observation was corroborated by a study indicating TikTok's ascendancy over YouTube in average U.S. watch time in 2021, with subsequent research from parental control software vendor Qustodio revealing that juveniles aged four to eighteen dedicated a staggering sixty percent more time to TikTok than YouTube in 2023, a trend TikTok seeks to further capitalise on through the recent introduction of sixty-minute upload capabilities, evidently a strategic gambit to directly challenge YouTube's dominance.

Indeed, a recent development this very week saw Netflix unveil its proprietary TikTok-esque interface within its mobile application, manifesting as a novel vertical video stream presenting curated recommendations, idiosyncratically tailored to each individual subscriber.

Conversely, during the proceedings, the United States government endeavours to demonstrate that Meta contravened antitrust legislation through the acquisition of entities such as Instagram and WhatsApp, thereby establishing a social networking hegemony; a document of this nature possesses the potential to undermine the prosecution's case, considering that, within the company's internal discourse, Meta executives were contemplating the severe competitive inroads made by TikTok against Facebook.

Zuckerberg, for example, highlighted that notwithstanding Facebook's continuing pre-eminence in terms of daily and weekly active users, it had ceased to be the paramount application gauged by user engagement duration.

He further elucidated how TikTok engenders a sense of shared context, positing that a congruence of interests amongst individuals will likely precipitate a convergence of algorithmic recommendations within the platform's feed.

“This imbues it with an intrinsic social dimension, obviating the need to transmit content to an acquaintance by positing their prior engagement with it,” the CEO explicated. “Attaining a comparable state with disparate topics and disassociated content on Facebook would represent a significant advancement.”

Other members of the executive leadership cadre also proffered their views.

WhatsApp custodian Will Cathcart posited that TikTok users, by appending remarks to videos within a specific niche, effectively primed the algorithm to progressively aggregate them and fellow commentators towards the same video content.

Stan Chudnovsky, then a Vice President and General Manager at Meta, remarked that Meta had now initiated competition within a domain that had become highly atomised, with a multitude of enterprises impinging upon their expansion.

“Merely assimilating a novel format, analogous to our antecedent implementation of Stories, no longer suffices; the landscape of digital engagement is now remarkably multifaceted, replete with myriad platforms vying for user attention,” he further elucidated, adducing prevailing social applications within the United States, including but not limited to TikTok, Twitter, iMessage, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.

John Hegeman, the erstwhile VP of ads (currently the chief revenue officer), conceded that TikTok manifestly held sway in domains such as ephemeral video content, hierarchical arrangement functionalities, and generative utilities, though he posited Meta's potential to mitigate the disparity by inducing creators to concurrently promulgate their content on Reels.

He expressed reservations, however, regarding the precise extent of Meta's deficit in the realms of machine learning, technical infrastructure, and creative instrumentation. The document portrays, from Meta's perspective, a scenario where Facebook occupies the position of an underdog within the social media landscape.

Nor is it the sole document that has emerged during the trial to evince Meta’s apprehension of competition; Zuckerberg himself testified last month that TikTok’s ascendance posed an existential threat to Meta’s enterprise and had decelerated its trajectory of growth.