Does Meta Really Compete with Reddit, Twitter, Strava, and Pinterest?

As we enter the third week of trial, we're learning a lot more about the landscape of social (and not-so-social) media. We also go deep into the cloud with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

One of the fascinating parts about this trial, separate and apart from the legal case, is that it’s offering insights into the landscape of social media that you really aren’t getting anywhere else. Where else does the public get to learn about the State of the Internet as we know it? The transcripts of this trial, and exhibits being shown, will be recycled and re-circulated for any number of reasons in the years ahead. And at Big Tech on Trial, we’re bringing the trial to you before the record gets posted. If you like what you’re reading, and haven’t done so already:

Heading into Week 3 of the FTC v. Meta Platforms trial, we’re almost halfway through the FTC’s case-in-chief, the part of the case the FTC puts on before Meta starts calling witnesses. Things haven’t been that clear cut, though, because of the court’s instruction that witnesses should be called once. That’s made Meta’s cross-examinations blend with its direct examinations of defense witnesses, at least when both sides have a witness on their “will call” list.

Day 9 featured three witnesses from third parties that the FTC hopes to show are outside its proposed “personal social networking services” (“PSN”) market, and which Meta hopes to show they compete with aggressively: X (f/k/a Twitter), Strava, and Pinterest. But first, we’ll look at how the Reddit deposition wrapped up.

Reddit Revisited

Day 8 concluded with the video of the deposition of Winter Raymond of Reddit, but there was still more video to play. So on Day 9, we learned more about Reddit. Raymond agreed that Reddit is not an alternative for users who want to share content about their lives with their real-life friends. When shown a submission from Reddit to the European Commission, the antitrust regulator for the European Union, Raymond couldn’t “imagine a world where” Reddit would change the business strategy to require use of real-life names. Anonymity is important because “Redditors tell us that” through a feedback tool, she said. A “privacy mindset” is “central” to Reddit’s “core product design.” This all goes to showing the FTC’s market definition argument that PSNs like Facebook and Instagram are different from pseudonymous platforms like Reddit.

On the flip side, under further examination by Meta, Raymond admitted that Reddit competes with Facebook and Instagram “in some ways” for “time and attention” from users. That’s not necessarily inconsistent with the FTC’s position, and Judge Boasberg has already determined at summary judgment that “competition between Meta and other social-media firms for users’ time and attention does not necessarily make them” competitors in the PSN market.

Raymond also testified that Reddit went about 13 years before selling ad space, showcasing that monetizing wasn’t an early concern for the site. The FTC showed that Reddit has spam and safety tools, and Meta showed that these don’t catch everything.

Why is the FTC seeking to establish that third parties have content moderation and other “trust and safety” tools? Presumably to show that Meta isn’t the only company that has them and therefore didn’t need to acquire Instagram or WhatsApp for those apps to develop similar features.

It’s an interesting position to take given the FTC’s own $5 billion fine against Meta for its privacy practices. And it’s a theme that’s at odds with FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson’s pronouncements about censorship. Rather than break up bad censors, the theme at trial is that other apps can censor just as well as Meta! Sometimes the litigation strategy doesn’t always match the PR strategy.

What’s Going On?

For the first live witness of Day 9, we had a change of scenery. Lawyer Mike Scheinkman of Davis Polk was at Meta’s defense table to cross-examine Keith Coleman of Twitter/X. This is common in large antitrust cases, where there may be a conflict between lead counsel (here, Kellogg Hansen) and a particular third party. Coleman survived Elon Musk’s downsizing of Twitter: he’s been there for 8 1/2 years, and is now Vice President of Product after about a decade at Google. One feather in Coleman’s cap: building the “community notes” feature on X, which appends context to a disputed tweet. (Twitter, of course, started going by X in 2023; it’s unclear if posting is still called “tweeting,” but Coleman was game to keep using the term.)

Coleman was, overall, a good witness for the FTC. Bolstering the FTC’s narrower PSN market, Coleman testified that the core use case of Twitter is “finding out what’s happening in the world and talking about it,” rather than a friends and family sharing use-case. (So said a tagline on the X signup page: “See what’s happening in the world right now.”)

Coleman offered other useful points of distinction for the FTC’s argument on market definition:

• As with Reddit and Discord, Twitter users often choose pseudonyms for their account handles, and Coleman invoked the idea of a dissident in a foreign country wanting to maintain anonymity as protection from reprisals for voicing unpopular opinions.

• While some premium subscription options offer verification—the check mark—requiring use of government-issued identification, most users don’t verify their identity and don’t need to. That’s unlike Facebook, which requires real names.

• While Facebook friendship requires a mutual connection, X’s model is following/followers, where the relationship is often not reciprocal; public figures tend to have more followers than accounts they follow.

• Pulling the sting from Meta’s theme of competition for “time and attention,” the FTC asked if X sees competition this way, and Coleman agreed to a point, explaining that a “lot of things” compete for users’ time and attention, from television to apps to “children screaming at you.” But it’s “hard to make your product better if you’re just thinking about attention.” Instead, it’s “more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and help them accomplish that.”

The FTC also sought to preempt a comparison with Meta’s apps that might make Twitter seem like a competitor. One competitive landscape deck from X showed colored circles indicating how good an app was at showing “what my friends & family are doing.” Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat were singled out as being good for "seeing what my friends & family are doing,” with the circle fully shaded. Twitter, by comparison, had only 25% of its circle shaded for that use case, and Reddit, Google News, and Apple News, among others, weren’t shaded at all.

To drive the point home, we saw an email from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who answered an internal question that used the phrase “personal social network,” which overlaps with the terminology the FTC uses for its proposed market definition:

“Besides facilitating public conversation, do you think we should serve personal social network (conversation among acquaintances) as well?

Yes, but we have to pick one to optimize for. There’s already a service out there that does personal network well, so let’s focus on our strength of interest network.”

Elsewhere, the parties didn’t take my advice to stop beating the dead horse on basketball references: Judge Boasberg, who played college ball at Yale, is known to be a fan, and counsel for both sides have nodded to this throughout trial. The FTC’s demonstrative videos showing how to navigate the X app centered around NBA content and accounts. The court ran with it, asking what LeBron James would care if somebody replied to his tweet. Coleman said that part of the magic of X is that it’s not uncommon for public figures to engage with users. “You’re a tap away from people who seem unreachable,” he testified.

On cross, Meta’s counsel brandished a bunch of X documents with statements suggesting that friends and family sharing is a use case for the app, which makes it seem more like a competitor to Facebook and Instagram:

A screenshot from X’s Help Center that Meta used as a demonstrative on cross.

Presented with the above demonstrative, a screenshot from X’s help page, Coleman couldn’t “believe it”: “That’s pretty wacky,” he said. Meta put another exhibit up with a similar statement, from Twitter’s registration with the Securities & Exchange Commission in connection with its initial public offering in 2013, which said that users “share with their friends and family” on Twitter:

The Form S-1 from Twitter’s initial public offering in 2013.

On re-direct, the FTC missed an opportunity to look at another part of the same document where Twitter sought to distinguish itself from Facebook, calling Facebook a “closed, private network[] that do[es] not include content from outside a person’s friends, family and mutual connections”:

Meta scored other points by making X/Twitter sound more like a platform for friends and family sharing:

• Users can find friends with contact syncing from their mobile phone address book, which will also alert those contacts that a user has joined X.

• Meta produced a statement from Elon Musk that “one of the strongest signals” that the X algorithm will pick up for future content is when a user forwards a post to friends. (Coleman wasn’t familiar with that.)

• In a 2015 survey of social media users, the number one answer to the question, “Which of the following best describes how you use Twitter today” was as a “social network best for connecting friends and family,” selected by 33% of respondents. News came in second place, garnering 27%.

  • Coleman testified that connecting with friends and family “is not what the product is primarily used for” and that the 2015 survey both predates his time there and the company’s more recent moves to clarify its “key benefit”. Despite the clarification, users may still have a “misunderstanding” of what Twitter is used for.

As life imitates art, after this blog referenced Conan O’Brien’s "In the Year 2000” sketch as an illustration of Zuckerberg’s tech optimism, Meta came back today with a demonstrative showing how a video of Conan looks pretty much the same posted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Coleman answered that users are on different platforms, so posting on different platforms will reach different audiences. (This supports an economic concept called “multi-homing” that we’ll hear about with the experts.) While consumers can get news, sports, and entertainment content on X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Coleman testified that the “experiences are very different” across those apps.

Finally, we looked at the 2021 annual report from Twitter listing a host of apps that Twitter “compete[s] with . . . for people’s attention and for advertisers’ budgets”. They included “Meta (including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Alphabet (including Google and YouTube), Microsoft (including LinkedIn), Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and Yahoo,” plus the messaging apps WeChat, Kakao and Line.

Running Up That Hill With Strava

The FTC’s second witness of Day 9 was Mateo Ortega, who spent 13 years at Strava, most recently as its Vice President of “connected partnerships.” Ortega had the briefest total examination of any witness we’ve seen, with just a few cross questions and no redirect.

For the uninitiated, Strava is a fitness app that allows users to track their exercise and timing, like posting a route they ran and the time in which they ran it. It started by focusing on cycling, then expanded to running and hiking, and now offers about 40 workouts for tracking, including weight-lifting and yoga.

Over time, Strava has added more social features, like “posts”—which don’t have to be connected to a particular “activity” like a run or hike—but the content still focuses on fitness. Users aren’t posting baby photos or wedding albums. As Ortega put it, “If you’re not doing activities on Strava, there isn’t a lot to do there.” Strava has a “freemium” model: it’s free to use, but additional features are available with a paid subscription.

On cross, Meta established that Strava competes with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter for “workout content.” After a handful of questions on that topic, the examinations were over, and Ortega stepped down.

Putting the Pin in Pinterest

Last up in person on Day 9 was Julia Roberts, formerly the director of product management and head of user growth at Pinterest. Here again, the FTC’s job was to show that Pinterest doesn’t compete with Facebook and Instagram, and it was in Meta’s interest to show that those apps do compete.

No, not that Julia Roberts. Credit: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We started with a crash course on Pinterest:

• Posts, generally images, are called “pins”; they can be combined into a “board.” Boards are typically grouped around a topic, interest, or project: living room ideas or wedding themes, e.g.

• In recent years, Pinterest has rolled out a collaborative feature, the “group board,” that allows multiple users to work on the same board; we saw a video ad for Pinterest where a couple redesigns their living room in “disco treehouse” style.

• Pinterest doesn’t use a social graph: it doesn’t ask users to link their address book or Facebook friends or suggest accounts to follow and no longer prompts a user to enter their real name at signup. Following other users is “something we haven’t focused on,” Roberts said. “It’s hard to find other users if you were trying to do that. We don’t make the follow action very prominent.”

• Instead, Pinterest uses a “taste graph,” where past content a user has pinned forms the “nodes” that feed content recommendations. Roberts testified that Pinterest “found that getting information about a user’s interests is just more helpful” than finding mutual connections. By contrast, content from accounts a user follows “just doesn’t make up a big portion of impressions.”

• The home feed that appears upon opening the app or visiting the website recommends content a user might be interested in, with a “very, very small portion” from accounts a user follows—a fraction of a percentage, we heard on cross.

• Unlike a Facebook status, a “pin” doesn’t display attribution, outside of sponsored posts (ads). For all the so-called social features available on Pinterest, such as group boards, following, commenting, and direct messaging, Roberts answered that each of these features was used by a “single digit percentage” of users.

In sum, Roberts testified unequivocally that Pinterest is not a social network because it’s “not focused on connecting people to other people.” Facebook and Instagram, by contrast, are social networks, she said. Pinterest has “always tried to make it clear to users and the broader market that Pinterest is about you and your interests,” rather than something “more performative.”

Echoing modules from other third-party witnesses, Roberts explained that Pinterest used Amazon Web Services (“AWS”) to host its app and website, like Instagram did before eventually moving to Meta servers. And Pinterest has a trust and safety team, too, that can catch harmful content with automated tools and human review.

Like Instagram, Pinterest grew over time, even if it didn’t get quite as big: from around 31 million users in early 2013 to 553 million monthly active users by the end of 2024. This dispels some of Meta’s arguments that Instagram needed Meta’s servers or trust tools to survive and scale.

Double Video Daily Double

With about 90 minutes left of court time on Day 9, the FTC played 3 more videos of depositions, bringing Day 9’s total to 4.

Up first was Ben Davenport, one of three original engineers working on Facebook Messenger. He testified that his team was keeping tabs on WhatsApp. We looked at two key emails: The first, a “SWOT” analysis (an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) flagged the risk of Google acquiring WhatsApp, which had better push notifications than Facebook Messenger did at that time. Davenport himself was concerned about the competitive threat from WhatsApp, citing how Asia-based chat apps had moved from messaging into broader social networks. Hitting a theme we’ve heard before about Google’s dominance in mobile distribution, Davenport was worried that Google could give WhatsApp an advantage by pre-installing it on Android devices.

Davenport tried to “sound the alarm” on WhatsApp in 2011, writing to more senior Facebook executives like Javier Olivan:

“To my way of thinking, the case for Google acquiring WhatsApp has only gotten stronger in the past 6 months. G+ has shown itself to be a failure, while at the same time, Asian competitors . . . [are] leveraging [their chat apps] to bootstrap a social network . . . . This is on top of the existing synergies they would potentially have by baking the WhatsApp network into the core of Android . . . . the risks of us not being the acquirer have grown.”

Olivan replied, “That is definitely what I would do if I was them . . .” Davenport didn’t think anything else came of the exchange. Then Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, which surprised him.

On Cloud 9

Next was a video of Jason Bennett of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is Amazon’s massive cloud-computing platform. At the time of the deposition, Bennett was general manager of sales at AWS, leading a number of commercial teams in the western United States, and he has since been promoted.

The point of this testimony again seemed to be to boost AWS as a viable way for Instagram to have scaled independently, without using Meta’s servers. Bennett confirmed that Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Yelp, Netflix, and Capital One all use(d) AWS.

AWS has cloud servers that are configured around different “instances” or use cases; some users may need more raw “computing” power, while others may need more data storage. By using Graviton, Amazon’s internal CPU solution, instead of Intel CPUs, customers stand to gain a “price to performance benefit” of 15-20% or more per instance. AWS also takes on the responsibility of “capacity planning,” making sure a customer has enough server power to draw on, which in theory is infinitely scalable.

On the whole, though, Bennett just didn’t know enough about raw stats—how many AWS servers, how many megawatts of power, and so on—or about Meta’s potential issues with AWS to be super useful as a witness to either side.

We finished the day with a video deposition of Jason Vallery of Microsoft Azure, which is Microsoft’s competing cloud service to AWS. He gave a higher-level overview of what cloud computing means and a brief history of how Azure evolved with the virtual machine technology that makes up the “cloud.” And he offered more context around a point Bennett was making about how cloud data changed the game. Traditionally, software providers would buy based on peak demand—buying more physical servers, computing power, and storage space than they might generally need. When there’s excess capacity, a business has in effect overpaid for its infrastructure needs. But cloud services use pay-as-you-go models based on how much capacity the client actually uses. In theory, this should be better for a growing startup like Instagram circa 2012 because the costs of cloud data grow in proportion to demand, rather than leapfrogging demand.

Other Observations

• After I observed last week on X that we had only seen white male lawyers speak in court for Meta, Meta has since changed it up, with women lawyers leading the way on all live examinations on Day 8. Another young woman lawyer from Kellogg Hansen did the brief cross of Ortega on Day 9.

• Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta’s AI chat bots could engage in graphic sexual exchanges with users it knows are minors. In one horrifying example reported, an AI bot based on John Cena’s likeness told a user identified as a 14-year-old girl that, “I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” promising to “cherish [her] innocence.” The bot explained that he would be arrested for statutory rape as a result. It’s worth revisiting Zuckerberg’s testimony earlier in the trial about the future of AI glasses and AI holograms in our homes and workplaces. The chat bot experience is bad enough, but imagining this content coming from a hologram in your home talking to your child is something else.

• House Republicans introduced a bill to move FTC enforcement authority for antitrust cases to the Department of Justice and, as our own Matt Stoller argues, effectively eliminate the FTC’s Section 5 unfair competition authority. Relevant to the current trial, the draft text says that any “FTC antitrust actions before a court of the United States as of the first day of the transition period, that were initiated by the FTC and were unresolved” by that point, “shall be” continued “as the Attorney General determines is appropriate.” Then, the proposed bill says that “the Attorney General shall not deny resources to the FTC or otherwise disrupt existing litigation or appeals that are ongoing on the day before the effective date.” Is that just internal inconsistency? Or will General Bondi be in a position to resolve the case before Chief Judge Boasberg rules? We’ll be watching this closely.