Thank you for being a friend

‘We’ve always put friends and family at the core of our experience’, said Mark Zuckerberg. ‘We will ... prioritize posts from friends and family over public content’, said Adam Mosseri, then head of Facebook News Feed, now head of Instagram. That was in 2018 when the company pulled back on its news publisher referrals, in the process damaging the business models of some online publishers.

But the mood has changed.  Last week, Zuckerberg argued that sharing with family and friends is only one priority, with Meta now at the point where around 20% of Facebook content and 10% of Instagram content is generated by users’ friends. Reuters reported Zuckerberg’s observation that ‘people just kept on engaging with more and more stuff that wasn't what their friends were doing’.

These latest comments were delivered at hearings before the US Federal Court for the District of Columbia in the Federal Trade Commission’s action against Meta. The FTC is claiming that Meta is ‘illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct’. Meta’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 are central to the allegation that Meta sought to remove threats to what the FTC claims is its monopoly in social media services used to share content with friends and family. The FTC claims Meta engaged in a ‘buy-or-bury’ scheme.

Not surprisingly, Meta denies the allegations, saying that it did not seek to eliminate its competitors, that it bought the apps to improve and grow them, and that they are now ‘better, more reliable and more secure through billions of dollars and millions of hours of investment’. But it also argues that the FTC is working with an old conception of the market for these services. In fact, it has ‘gerrymandered a fictitious market’ that leaves out TikTok and YouTube.

Meta’s latest downplaying of family and friends doesn’t sit so well with the case it makes to Australian policymakers about the News Media Bargaining Code. Or at least, different aspects are emphasised for another regulatory defence. In February last year, when announcing its decision to not renew agreements with Australian publishers, Meta said, ‘We know people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content – they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests’. In its submission to the Senate committee investigating social media where it explained people’s reasons for using its platforms, Meta prioritised the desire ‘to connect with family and friends, join a community group focused on an interest or passion, to connect with public figures, small businesses and other organisations’. This was accompanied by e-commerce and ‘creator economy’ functions as well communications about natural disasters. And in evidence before that inquiry, Facebook representative Mia Garlick said, ‘there's been a massive shift that's occurred with consumer preferences. People are now primarily engaged in short-form video and primarily with the non-news comment’.

The ‘family & friends v public content’ dynamic in the FTC case is not exactly the same as ‘family & friends v news content’ in the Australian policy context. But in seeking to avoid regulation that forces it to compensate news producers, Meta is also keen to emphasise the substitutability of news on its platform: in its Senate submission, it said, ‘most people do not come to our services for news and news is highly substitutable on our services – this means that when news is not on our services, people continue to engage with other content’.

In other words, even if it doesn’t distribute much professionally produced news, Meta’s platforms continue to serve as important sources of public information. As we’ve said on many occasions, it’s reasonable to expect that certain social and regulatory obligations will attach to a prominent platform service that distributes public information.

Of course, it’s anyone’s guess how long Meta’s current explanation of the role of its platforms will last. The 2024 statement announcing the end of Facebook News tab reassured us that, ‘This does not impact our commitment to connecting people to reliable information on our platforms. We work with third-party fact-checkers …and we will continue to invest in this area.’ That’s one friendship that didn’t last.