In Meta's antitrust trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that TikTok’s success poses a significant threat to Meta’s business.
He stated that TikTok was a “top priority” and a “highly urgent” rivalrous threat when it was launched in 2018.
In Meta's antitrust trial on Wednesday, April 16 2025, Zuckerberg admitted that TikTok’s launch had adversely impacted Meta.
Meta experienced a sharp decline when TikTok rose to prominence, he added.
ByteDance-owned app has continued to be a focus of Meta’s competitive efforts for many years.
In 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly and merged it with TikTok the same year.
At the same time, Meta stopped reporting the number of Facebook users in quarterly reports, transitioning to a new “family of apps” metric, surrounding Instagram and WhatsApp.
During the trial, Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question regarding social media platforms “network effects.”
“The apps now serve primarily as discovery engines. People can take that content to messaging engines.” Zuckerberg told the court.
Around the same time; however, Facebook is trying to return to its OG roots by transitioning to those network effects again. Recently, Meta launched advanced features to simply connect with friends.
In January, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that a “return to OG Facebook” was a significant goals for 2025.
