Zuckerberg Admits Facebook Bought Instagram Because It Had a Better Camera

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, during his second day of testimony in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against his company, said Instagram had a “better” camera than Facebook — and that was a big reason Facebook decided to buy the app.

At the time, Facebook was doing a “build vs. buy analysis” on developing a camera for its mobile app, Zuckerberg said, according to Reuters. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”

Facebook ultimately bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. That acquisition, along with the company’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014, are at the center of the FTC’s antitrust case. The FTC, in a trial that has been years in the making, has accused Meta of squashing competition and illegally building a social media monopoly, thanks to those two deals.

The trial, being held in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, poses a significant threat to the $1.4 trillion social media juggernaut Zuckerberg has built.

Meta has fought back against the FTC’s antitrust claims, which the company said are “weak” in a blog post from Jennifer Newstead, its chief legal officer, on Sunday. Newstead argued that the FTC’s lawsuit is bogus because it conveniently ignores how Meta faces stiff competition for users’ time from platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

The 40-year-old CEO made the same argument on Monday in court, saying “we compete vigorously” with TikTok and YouTube. 

The average Facebook user in the U.S., as TheWrap reported last week, uses the app for 63 minutes per day on average, while the average Instagram user is on the app for 48 minutes per day. Combined, the pair narrowly edge past TikTok, where American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day scrolling and creating videos.

On Monday, the FTC shared an email from Zuckerberg in which he floated a “potentially crazy idea” to boost engagement on Facebook: deleting every users’ “friends,” in an effort to have them spend more time on the platform, adding friends back.

Zuckerberg took the stand for the second straight day on Tuesday, where he was peppered with questions on old emails he had sent about acquiring other tech companies.

Speaking about Instagram and Path in 2012, Zuckerberg said in an email their “businesses are nascent but the networks are established, the brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us.” That email comment was posted to X by Matthew Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, while he is inside the courtroom.

Meta’s stock is down 2.35% with about 90 minutes left to trade on Tuesday.

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