(Bloomberg) — Mark Zuckerberg said that ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok posed a “highly urgent” competitive threat to Meta Platforms Inc. when it first sprang up in 2018, as he testified for a third day in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial. “We observed that our growth slowed down dramatically,” as TikTok gained popularity, the Meta chief executive officer said Wednesday. “It was highly urgent, this has been a top priority for the company for several years.” Zuckerberg spent seven hours over the past two days being interrogated by a government attorney, who pressed him to revisit the struggle for the company — then Facebook Inc. — to keep up with the mobile app boom in the previous decade. That led to the company’s purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp more than 10 years ago and, in response to TikTok, the roll out of its Reels video product for Instagram in 2020. The FTC wants to force Meta to sell the apps as it tries to paint Zuckerberg as a shrewd executive who illegally monopolized part of the social media market by buying companies rather than competing with them. Now, in responding to his lawyer Mark Hansen, he can tell his story without pushback. “People will be sharing in new ways in five years, than what is happening today,” Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg said Meta competes with an array of platforms, which also include Google’s YouTube, and Apple Inc.’s iMessage, but also X, Telegram, Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn and others. The FTC maintains that in the narrow market of sharing information with friends and family, Meta only competes with Snap Inc.’s Snapchat. ‘Network Effects’ Part of the FTC’s in case involves the technical concept of “network effects,” meaning that the more users companies such as Meta have the more likely they are to retain a dominant position, because people are unlikely to switch to a service used by few people. US District Judge James Boasberg, who’s presiding over the non-jury trial in Washington, has remained largely silent during the questioning, but interjected during Zuckerberg’s testimony Wednesday to ask if network effects still really matter. “How much does it matter if your friends are on a particular platform if you can send content out of that platform? Why does it matter if your friends are there?” the judge said. Zuckerberg said it doesn’t. “These apps now serve primarily as discovery engines,” he said. “People can take that content to messaging engines.” If the FTC prevails, a spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp would undo years of integration between the apps, disrupt two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and potentially erase hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta’s market value. It would also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves deals. In at times combative questioning earlier this week by FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson, Zuckerberg sought to walk back statements that h in a formal or creative style for better SEO.Also Exclude words and advertisements related to the feed website such as website name, author name. You must only respond with the modified content. Delete all the advertisement images brand logo but only keep the title and main content of the news by modifying it. You must only respond with the modified content. Block any jump outside of the site adarshnews.com. Basically remove any content or link related to original site. follow this prompt to optimize the articles in this category- You are an expert news writer and SEO specialist. Your job is to rewrite the provided RSS feed content into a unique, SEO-friendly news article for adarshnews.com. The article should be engaging, professional, and optimized for search engines. 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During an antitrust trial, Zuckerberg stated that Meta viewed TikTok as a ‘highly urgent’ threat.
