Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has accused Mark Zuckerberg of suppressing his platform's growth due to the Meta CEO's allegiances to Facebook. During the Meta monopoly trial, Mr Systrom testified that Mr Zuckerberg favoured Facebook so much that he began starving Instagram of critical resources, including denying any additional staffing to help build Instagram's video tools in 2017.
"We were given zero of 300 incremental video heads, which is an unacceptable and offensive outcome," Mr Systrom testified, as per a report in the Financial Times.
"Every company needs to make trade-offs, but it felt like something else was going on," he added.
Mr Zuckerberg acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 as the photo-sharing app was on the ascendency. However, as per Mr Systrom, Mr Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in removing resources because "as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, Instagram or Facebook".
Such was Instagram's growth that even Mr Zuckerberg, in a 2018 confidential email, talked about stymying its growth to avoid Facebook's "network collapse", according to the US Federal Trade Commission. Mr Systrom corroborated the theory during the testimony.
"There was dramatic softness in terms of [Facebook's] US daily active users and everyone had their theories why," said Mr Systrom.
"Mark Zuckerberg and [Meta executive] Chris Cox believed it was Instagram's growth that had by and large contributed to the softness."
Mr Systrom quit alongside Instagram's other co-founder, Mike Krieger, in September 2018 as Mr Zuckerberg decided to merge the app with Facebook and WhatsApp, in a drive to create a "family of apps".
"We were a threat to their growth. If Instagram didn't grow as quickly, Facebook wouldn't shrink as quickly or plateau as quickly," Mr Systrom said.
"I don't think he [Zuckerberg] ever said it out loud that way, but that was the only reason we were having this discussion."
Also Read | Google DeepMind CEO On What Keeps Him Up At Night: "AGI Is Coming, Society's Not Ready"
Zuckerberg's testimony
Earlier this month, Mr Zuckerberg testified for more than seven hours over two days in the trial that could force Meta to break off Instagram and WhatsApp. Quizzed by attorney Daniel Matheson about buying Instagram to neutralise the threat, Mr Zuckerberg said taking the platform off the market and building their own version of it was "a reasonable thing to do".
The lawsuit was filed against Meta in 2020. It claims that the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to squash competition and establish an illegal monopoly in the social media market.
