Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, privately acknowledged concerns about competition from TikTok as early as February 2022, according to a recently published court filing related to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant. The filings highlight internal conversations that portray Facebook and Instagram not as industry leaders, but as “challengers” losing ground and relevance to TikTok’s rapidly growing dominance.
Zuckerberg described Facebook as having lost “mindshare and momentum,” remarking that TikTok excelled in creating a sense of “shared context” and visibility for trending content among close friends. He suggested this made TikTok inherently more social and sticky as users did not have to explicitly share content; the app’s algorithm guaranteed their friends had also seen similar videos, thus deepening user engagement.
Mosseri similarly conceded that Facebook was no longer the default platform for content discovery, proposing instead that YouTube occupied that position at the time, and speculating correctly that TikTok would ultimately surpass YouTube as well. “It’s interesting that [TikTok] is 100% video and beating us badly,” Mosseri noted, adding his belief that the social video app was expanding the total social mobile market and beginning to encroach upon traditional tensions such as television, Netflix, and other long-form content providers.
Mosseri accurately predicted TikTok’s trajectory. Soon after, a 2021 report revealed TikTok had overtaken YouTube in the U.S. for average watch time. By 2023, another study found that users aged 4 through 18 spent 60% more time on TikTok than YouTube. Reacting to these changing user behaviors, TikTok implemented longer video uploads of up to 60 minutes, directly challenging YouTube’s market share. Netflix, too, acknowledged the competitive threat by recently introducing vertical, TikTok-like short-form video feeds into its own mobile app.
Additional Meta leadership voices expressed similar concerns in internal exchanges. WhatsApp head Will Cathcart observed that TikTok’s comment-driven algorithm allowed niche communities and interests to organically form around specific content, enhancing a user’s sense of connectedness. Former Meta VP Stan Chudnovsky noted that efforts to introduce minor format innovations, such as Facebook Stories, were no longer sufficient amid the increasingly fragmented social media arena actively contested by other platforms like Snap, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and even Apple’s iMessage.
John Hegeman, then vice president of Ads and currently Chief Revenue Officer, admitted TikTok was far ahead in areas crucial to short-form video, including algorithmic ranking, compelling user creation tools, and robust user engagement. While he suggested Meta could narrow the gap by incentivizing creators to publish through Instagram Reels, he was less optimistic about quickly catching up to TikTok’s advanced machine learning tools and engineering innovations that bolster the app’s content discovery and curation.
These internal documents complicate the FTC’s legal case against Meta, in which U.S. antitrust authorities accuse the company of violating competition laws through strategic acquisitions, notably of Instagram and WhatsApp, to consolidate power in social networking. The disclosed executive communications directly contradict the government’s claims by depicting Facebook as struggling to maintain market dominance in the face of significant competitive threats.
Indeed, Zuckerberg himself had previously testified at trial recognizing TikTok’s growth had posed a distinct operational risk to Meta, impeding their platform’s overall growth trajectory.
