Newly unsealed filings in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust suit lay bare the conviction among Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other Meta executives that TikTok was decisively outflanking Meta on its home ground.

Dating from February 2022, this document encapsulates exchanges among several Meta executives deliberating the strategic orientation and market standing of Facebook and Instagram. In one such communication, Zuckerberg characterizes Facebook as a "challenger divested of its spirit and impetus," further positing that TikTok cultivates a "sense of communal context" enabling peers to engage with identical memes.

Mosseri, concurring that Facebook ought to be considered a contender rather than the default discovery engine, posited that while YouTube might currently predominate as the preferred modality, Meta's internal telemetry portended TikTok's eventual ascendancy over the Alphabet subsidiary's video platform.

"For Facebook, the most organic differentiation strategy lies in establishing itself as the default locus of discovery; yet, what proves particularly salient is TikTok's monadic video format, creating a significant chasm between our offerings," posits Mosseri. "My conjecture is that they are not merely augmenting the social mobile market but also making substantial inroads into television, long-form video content, and indeed, even encroaching upon Netflix's domain."

Moser's perspective appears to have been vindicated: an investigation revealed that TikTok surpassed YouTube in average viewership duration in the United States in 2021. Furthermore, a separate inquiry conducted by Qustodio, a purveyor of parental control software, discerned that individuals aged 4 to 18 dedicated 60% more time to TikTok than to YouTube in 2023. Commensurately, TikTok initiated the allowance of uploads up to 60 minutes in length last year, presumably as a countermeasure to YouTube's dominance in longer-form content.

This week, Netflix inaugurated a TikTok-esque experiential paradigm within its mobile application, proffering a novel vertical feed featuring bespoke video recommendations meticulously curated for each individual user.

However, in this legal action, the US government endeavours to establish a violation of competition law, positing that Meta cultivated a social networking monopoly through its acquisition of entities such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and documents like this could constitute detrimental evidence for the lawsuit, particularly considering the fact that internal discussions among Meta executives acknowledged the extent to which Facebook was being surpassed by TikTok.

For instance, Zuckerberg underscored that even though Facebook persisted as the application commanding the most extensive daily or weekly user base, it no longer held supremacy in terms of user engagement duration.

Furthermore, he posited that TikTok possesses a mechanism affording users a sense of "shared context," implying a strong propensity for you and your associates to encounter identical content within your respective TikTok feeds, contingent upon mutual topical interests.

"This inherently becomes a social construct, as one is absolved of the necessity to forward content to friends, presuming their prior exposure," the CEO explicated. "It would be a tremendous boon should we achieve such a level on platforms like Facebook, even with topics or content lacking immediate relevance."

他の幹部各位も、各々の見解を臆することなく開陳いたしました。

Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, underscored how the algorithmic architecture, through the mechanism of users' ability to comment on videos within specific, even recondite, niches, effectively engineers a feedback loop that progressively steers them and their fellow commentators towards the very same content over time.

Stan Chudnovsky, then Meta's VP and GM, further elaborated that Meta had already embarked on a competitive trajectory within a highly atomized landscape, a terrain where myriad enterprises were actively encroaching upon its expansion.

"Merely adding new formats, as we did with Stories, is no longer adequate; there are simply too many other venues where people congregate," he asserted, citing an array of popular social applications in the United States including TikTok, Twitter, iMessage, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.

John Hegeman, then Vice President of Advertising (now Chief Revenue Officer), while conceding TikTok's clear ascendancy in domains encompassing short-form video content, algorithmic ranking functionalities, and creative toolkit proficiencies, articulated Meta's conviction in its capacity to bridge this disparity by incentivizing creators to proliferate content on Reels.

Nonetheless, he articulated reservations concerning the extent of Meta's developmental lag in machine learning, technical domains, and authoring platforms, asserting that the document posits Facebook as an underdog within the social media landscape, reflecting Meta's internal assessment.

Furthermore, this document is by no means the sole testament to the palpable apprehensions harboured by Meta regarding competitive pressures, as evinced throughout the protracted judicial proceedings; indeed, Zuckerberg himself, in testimony rendered just last month, explicitly posited that the ascendance of TikTok constituted a material peril to Meta's commercial viability and had, in fact, demonstrably impeded its own trajectory of expansion.