Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has alleged that Mark Zuckerberg deliberately held back the platform’s growth, fearing it could outshine Facebook. Systrom made the claims while testifying during the ongoing Meta monopoly trial in the United States.
According to Systrom, Meta’s CEO refused to allocate necessary resources to Instagram, including staff for developing video tools, in 2017. “We were given zero of 300 incremental video heads, which is an unacceptable and offensive outcome,” he said, as reported by the Financial Times. “Every company needs to make trade-offs, but it felt like something else was going on.”
Power struggle within the Meta empire
Zuckerberg acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 when the photo-sharing app was rapidly gaining popularity. But Systrom believes the Facebook founder grew uneasy about Instagram’s success. “As the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, Instagram or Facebook,” he said.
By 2018, internal concerns about Facebook’s declining engagement were mounting. The US Federal Trade Commission cited a confidential email in which Zuckerberg considered slowing Instagram’s growth to avoid a “network collapse” on Facebook. Systrom supported that theory during his testimony.
“There was dramatic softness in terms of [Facebook’s] US daily active users, and everyone had their theories why,” he said. “Mark Zuckerberg and [Meta executive] Chris Cox believed it was Instagram’s growth that had by and large contributed to the softness.”
Departure and fallout
Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger left Instagram in September 2018, soon after Zuckerberg decided to merge Instagram more closely with Facebook and WhatsApp, pushing his vision of a “family of apps.”
“We were a threat to their growth,” Systrom said. “If Instagram didn’t grow as quickly, Facebook wouldn’t shrink or plateau as quickly. I don’t think he [Zuckerberg] ever said it out loud that way, but that was the only reason we were having this discussion.”
Zuckerberg’s defense
Earlier in April, Zuckerberg testified for over seven hours across two days in the same trial. When asked by attorney Daniel Matheson whether acquiring Instagram was a way to neutralize a competitive threat, he defended the move as a “reasonable thing to do.”
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2020, accuses Meta of using acquisitions, including Instagram and WhatsApp, to eliminate competition and secure an illegal monopoly in the social media space.