With the primary week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, paperwork shared by the U.S Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) supplied extra perception into Meta’s inside struggles to maintain Fb related. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled completely different visions for Fb’s future to spice up its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was lowering. 

Quick-forward to 2025, and Meta remains to be grappling with this problem. Mark Zuckerberg stated through the firm’s This fall earnings name in January that the corporate needs to restore Facebook’s cultural relevance this 12 months with a return to “OG Fb.” A part of its resolution for this drawback is the latest launch of a revamped Friends tab. 

In a collection of messages from April 2022, which had been shared as proof through the trial, Zuckerberg mentioned considerations about Fb’s “Associates” construction and format being outdated as each different main platform targeted on “Following.”

He thought of ditching the Associates format and even prompt deleting everyone’s Facebook friends and having them begin once more.

A number of the highlights from Mark Zuckerberg’s emails are under.

Issues round Fb shedding cultural relevance

• “I need to make certain we’ve a novel imaginative and prescient for the FB app that may result in sustainable progress over time. Regardless that the FB app’s engagement is regular in lots of locations, it appears like its cultural relevance is lowering rapidly and I fear that this can be a number one indicator of future well being points. Even when IG and WA do nicely, I don’t see a path for our firm to reach the best way we’d like if FB falters, so we have to get this proper.”
• “My principle is that we have to refresh the graph construction of FB to ensure that it to realize cultural relevance and a greater long run path.”
• “I believe we have to discover a technique that doesn’t go away one service choosing up the scraps the opposite service leaves behind or having both service artificially or unreasonably constrain itself. Proper now IG is doing nicely on cultural relevance and FB isn’t, so I’m extra targeted on determining an affordable path for FB long term.”

Worrying that Fb’s “friending” construction is outdated

• “The FB app owns the idea of friending, so if there have been a strategy to freshen this up and make it a extra related a part of life within the 2020s then this may very well be an excellent path.”
• “Friending feels out of vogue proper now for a minimum of just a few causes. First, lots of people’s pal graphs are stale and never stuffed with the folks they need to hear from or join with. Second, it feels heavyweight to request somebody new as a pal, which makes it laborious to rectify the primary problem. More often than not after I meet somebody or turn out to be all for somebody I simply need to observe them first however not ask something of them. Third, and associated, since FB doesn’t really feel as culturally related, that provides additional weight to including some on FB vs different companies.”
• “It feels to me just like the FB app’s place in cultural relevance is deeply tied to the pal graph construction versus different organizing rules — for instance, IG/Twitter-style observe graphs, TikTok-style pure algorithmic strategy, Teams/Reddit-style communities, and so on.”

Proposed options

• “Each different trendy social community is constructed on following relatively than friending, so its appears potential that the FB app is simply outdated as a result of it by no means adopted this elementary innovation. The way in which to rectify this could be to totally undertake following. If we needed to do that, I don’t suppose that merely supporting following for public accounts could be adequate. I believe we’d have to modify from friending to following on non-public accounts as nicely (despite the fact that this could work equally for these accounts) and we’d most likely need to do away with the idea of liking pages as nicely.”
• “One doubtlessly loopy concept is to think about wiping everybody’s graphs and having them begin once more. This clearly carries the chance that if we did that then lots of people simply wouldn’t rebuild their graphs or would turn out to be much less engaged, so if we needed to think about this we’d need to construct out an experiment and take a look at it in a smaller nation to ensure it led to a constructive end result. I believe we’d must do one thing comparatively excessive like this to maneuver the needle although and I don’t suppose small issues like spring cleansing flows would transfer the needle.”