A recent deposition submitted in the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust proceedings against Meta Platforms, unsealed on Monday, purportedly reveals the apprehension of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other senior executives concerning TikTok’s perceived competitive dominance over Meta’s core functionalities.

The document, bearing the date of February 2022, encapsulates dialogues among a plethora of Meta executives deliberating Facebook and Instagram’s overarching strategy and prevailing market standing. In one particular communique, Zuckerberg characterized Facebook as a "challenger" that has demonstrably "lost the mindshare and momentum," further appending that TikTok engenders a "feeling of shared context" wherein confederates are privy to the same cultural ephemera, according to his utterance.

Mosseri further concurred that Facebook ought to be conceptualised as a challenger in the current milieu, observing its forfeiture of the default discovery engine mantle, and posited that whilst YouTube presently held sway as the preferred discovery engine, he anticipated TikTok’s eventual ascendancy over the Google-owned video platform, extrapolating from Meta’s readily available data.

Mosseri posited that while Facebook's most ostensibly viable differentiation stratagem resided in its function as the prevailing discovery interface, the ascendancy of TikTok, a platform exclusively predicated on video content, and its considerable competitive advantage, evinced a compelling paradox. He hypothesised that TikTok's burgeoning trajectory was predicated not solely on cannibalising the existing social mobile landscape but also on encroaching upon the dominion of traditional television, protracted video formats, and streaming services like Netflix.

Mosseri's prescience is underscored by recent findings, with one study demonstrating TikTok's surpassing of YouTube in average U.S. watch time during 2021, while another, from parental control software provider Qustodio, revealed that children between the ages of four and eighteen dedicated 60% more time to TikTok than YouTube in 2023, a trend TikTok aims to further capitalise on through its introduction of 60-minute upload capabilities last year, directly challenging YouTube's established dominance.

In recent days, Netflix has unveiled its proprietary iteration of a TikTok-esque interface within its mobile application, presenting a novel vertical video feed that curates and recommends content, algorithmically tailored to the individual viewer's predispositions.

However, the gravamen of the U.S. government's contention in the trial is that Meta's acquisitions of entities such as Instagram and WhatsApp constituted egregious contraventions of antitrust legislation, effectively engendering a social networking hegemon. The potential for a document of this nature to be prejudicial to the case is considerable, particularly given the contemporaneous internal discourse among Meta executives regarding Facebook's manifest competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis TikTok.

Zuckerberg, for instance, observed that notwithstanding Facebook's potential enduring pre-eminence as the most capaciously engaged-with application daily or weekly, it had been supplanted in terms of user temporal investment.

He further extrapolated that TikTok furnishes a mechanism for engendering a pervasive sense of shared context; ergo, should proclivities align amongst peers, a concurrent encounter with analogous content within the TikTok feed is a highly probable outcome.

“This renders it intrinsically social, as opposed to necessitating the transmission of content to a contact, one can simply presuppose their prior engagement with it,” the chief executive elaborated. “Attaining such a degree of pervasiveness with respect to topics and disparate content on Facebook would be highly advantageous.”

Concurrently, other members of the executive echelon also proffered their perspectives.

WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart posited that TikTok's algorithmic architecture might, by virtue of users' propensity for commenting within specific content niches, progressively cohere individuals and fellow commentators around concordant video material.

Stan Chudnovsky, at that juncture a Vice President and General Manager at Meta, appended that Meta had now commenced vying within a highly atomised domain where numerous enterprises were encroaching upon their expansion trajectory.

The mere integration of a novel format (akin to our implementation of Stories) no longer suffices; the landscape is replete with myriad alternative platforms vying for users' attention, he further elaborated, referencing a pantheon of prevalent social applications within the U.S. such as TikTok, Twitter, iMessage, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.

John Hegeman, then the VP of advertising and now the chief revenue officer, readily acknowledged TikTok's undeniable preeminence in domains such as brief video formats, algorithmic ranking functionalities, and sophisticated creator toolkits, yet posited that Meta possessed the potential to bridge this disparity by incentivizing content creators to simultaneously disseminate their work on Reels.

Conversely, he expressed greater circumspection regarding the extent of Meta's lag in the realms of machine learning, technical infrastructure, and creative utilities, while the document portrays Facebook, in Meta's estimation, as an underdog within the social media landscape.

This is not the sole document to emerge during the trial underscoring Meta’s trepidation regarding market competition; Zuckerberg’s recent testimony explicitly acknowledged TikTok’s ascendance as a palpable threat to Meta’s operational viability and a contributing factor to its decelerated expansion.