Zuckerberg planned to erase all Facebook friends
Mark Zuckerberg was planning to erase the friend lists of all users. During the investigation of the Meta antitrust case in the United States, internal correspondence in the company revealed that the Facebook founder had been planning to delete all users' friend lists in 2022.
This became known during the trial, where antitrust regulators accuse Meta of creating a digital monopoly by acquiring competitors such as Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. The US federal government claims that by reducing the number of popular internet companies, Facebook has reduced competition in the advertising market. A strong argument in favour of this view was an internal letter from Zuckerberg himself, where he stated that "it is better to buy than to compete". Meta's lawyers argue that the acquisition of the companies was legal, and that the acquisition of other companies did not prevent competing TikTok and Youtube from successfully competing in the advertising market.
However, an interesting detail became known from internal correspondence. It turned out that in 2022, the company was looking for methods to combat the waning interest in active social media. Mark came up with the idea of clearing the friends column for all social network users to make them start all over again, as it was almost twenty years ago, when the social network was first introduced. During the discussion, an option was considered to start by deleting the friends of all users in a small country to test their reaction and not to have a significant decrease in the subscriber base in case of a negative reaction. If this action would really increase activity, Mark allowed for such a bloodletting to take place on a regular basis, say, once a year.
Despite the fact that the possible deletion of all friends has nothing to do with market share and is not illegal, this information received a great deal of publicity. When a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission asked Zuckerberg himself about the veracity of this information, he snidely replied that as far as he could remember, they had never done it after all.
Source: www.businessinsider.com
