Social media is dead. Meta has admitted as much. What now?

Back in March, Facebook introduced a new feature that wasn’t exactly new. The Friends tab—described by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as “a throwback to OG Facebook”—is a way for the app’s users to see only the latest posts from friends, and none of the algorithm-recommended content otherwise dominating their feeds. Personal social networking, once Facebook’s core product, had finally been relegated to a nostalgic lark its users could whimsically opt into.

Less than a month later, with its years-in-the-making antitrust trial, the Federal Trade Commission sought to prove Meta’s early-2010s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave it a monopoly on personal social networking sites. Over the course of the trial’s six weeks, Meta’s defense emerged: a precise accounting of why Facebook’s new Friends feature feels so quaint and retro. As detailed in a just-released post-trial brief, Meta’s argument is that it can’t possibly have a monopoly on personal social networking—because personal social networking no longer meaningfully exists.

That’s entirely due to the way people now use Facebook and Instagram, with most of them drawn to what Meta calls “unconnected” content, from accounts users don’t even follow. 

The protracted legal battle began in December 2020, when the FTC filed its lawsuit against Meta in conjunction with 46 states. The agency claimed Meta had scooped up smaller social startups like Instagram to extinguish their threat to its supremacy, and used the reach of its platforms to slow down user growth among competitors. (Less compelling for the FTC, apparently, were the instances in which Meta allegedly just copied features from the companies it didn’t acquire.)

Unfortunately for the FTC, the lawsuit began taking shape right as TikTok was enjoying the kind of explosive growth that Meta’s monopoly is meant to have made impossible, and right as that growth’s seismic impact on the entire social media landscape settled in.

The FTC’s idea of social media is outdated

In its earliest days, Facebook was all about connection, rather than content. People used it to build digital rapport with new friends, get back in touch with old ones, and keep tabs on crushes. Gradually, though, the site’s News Feed began absorbing more and more of the greater internet around it, to discourage users from ever leaving. Even before TikTok’s For You page hit social media like a nonchronological atom bomb, Meta seemed to realize that content relevance was driving engagement more than friendship strength, and began peppering in “unconnected” posts that algorithmically matched user interest. TikTok’s ascendance merely accelerated the shift toward unconnected-ness. 

Log into Facebook in 2025, perhaps to search for a used couch on Marketplace, and what awaits between updates from friends is a heady brew of sponsored posts, straight-up ads, dispatches from various celebrities and politicians, and, yes, a bottomless well of short-form video content. The significance of Meta’s evolution, though, seems lost on the FTC.

The agency has worked itself into contortions to argue that Meta’s primary offering is still “personal social networking,” and that Meta isn’t competing against TikTok or YouTube. In its opening statement, the FTC narrowly defined the market for its antitrust case, citing Meta competitors as insignificant as BeReal and MeWe, while excluding obvious peers such as X and TikTok, along with YouTube. With this puzzlingly limited definition of the services Facebook and Instagram provide, the FTC claims Meta’s market share of personal social networking sites amounts to 78% of all monthly active users and 85% of time spent in-app.

That assertion holds water, however, only if the mid-aughts version of social media were still a market any of these apps is currently competing to dominate.

During the trial, the FTC thoroughly emphasized TikTok and YouTube’s disinterest in “friend sharing” as a means of differentiating them from Meta’s apps. Adam Presser, who leads operations at TikTok, testified that only around 1% of users’ time on TikTok is spent on the app’s Friends tab. (The company only keeps that feature around, he claimed, in hopes that it might eventually enhance users’ experience in some way.) The FTC further revealed during the trial the failure of YouTube’s mid-2010s experiments with adding social features like private messaging, and that YouTube has since abandoned friend-sharing as a goal.

If anything, the FTC may have been too convincing in its portrayal of the short-form video giants’ indifference toward friend sharing. By doing so, the agency left an opening for Meta to argue why its own apps are now similarly inclined.

People’s habits have shifted away from friend sharing

In its posttrial brief, Meta reveals the full extent to which it was rattled by TikTok’s late-2010s success with both short-form video and AI recommendations, which the company claims slowed user growth for both Facebook and Instagram.

“Meta consequently made a major strategic shift to respond to competition,” the brief states. “It invested billions of dollars to develop its own AI-recommendation algorithms to rival TikTok and introduced a new feature (called Reels) to serve the demonstrated consumer demand that was shifting away from friend sharing.”

The document goes on to mention that a Meta executive, whose name and title are redacted, has been “paying creators hundreds of millions of dollars” to secure exclusive content for Instagram. For better or worse, to suggest that Meta has not been competing in the arms race for unconnected video content is to deny reality.

At the same time, Meta’s users have demonstrably gravitated to content over connection. The posttrial brief cites a 2023 experiment to determine what most engages Facebook users. Upon increasing “friend-original” content in users’ feeds by 20%, the company reported that users began spending less time on the app. When Meta took the opposite tact, however, serving more short-form video content instead, users stayed locked in longer. 

Skip ahead to 2025 and Meta now claims users spend only 7% of their time on Instagram and 17% of their time on Facebook consuming content from online friends. 

Social media as an industry is now more than 20 years old. At the time Facebook first hit critical mass, adults may have been thrilled with the novelty of being digitally linked to so many friends and acquaintances. Zoomers, on the other hand, have grown up with social media and have been able to choose whether and how to connect online with friends their entire lives. Many now seem to prefer doing so in group chats and messaging apps. If they come to Facebook at all these days, many apparently do so as yet another means of consuming content. According to Meta’s posttrial brief, “The number of new young adult monthly active users with zero friends after 90 days on Facebook has increased from only 8% to 10% in 2012 to nearly 50% today.”

In retrospect, Meta may have rolled out its “OG Facebook”-style Friends tab less than a month before the antitrust trial began just to prove how uninterested today’s users are in friend sharing. The posttrial brief cites, in its as-yet-unsealed evidence, “de minimis usage of the new dedicated Friends Tab” as confirmation that “the puck is moving elsewhere.”

Where social media goes from here is yet to be determined

So, where is social media heading? There are plenty of hints in where it already is—much of them having to do with AI.

Social apps are currently inundated with all manner of AI slop. A Cornell University study found that during the 2024 election about 12% of images and 1.4% of text posts on X were AI-generated. More recently, TikTok has seen a surge in AI-generated video content—with a clip of bunnies on trampolines, created by Google Veo 3, garnering more than 230 million views on the app this summer.

And beyond the AI that users are posting to these apps, the platforms have been experimenting with AI chatbots as a new form of “friend” to connect with. So far, the results have been decidedly mixed. Back in March, for instance, a Facebook Messenger chatbot named “Big sis Billie” reportedly lured a cognitively impaired man to a physical address across state lines. The man tripped and fell along the way, ultimately dying from his injuries.

Early on in the antitrust trial, Zuckerberg described his vision of social media’s future. Despite the relative failures of the Metaverse and Apple Vision Pro recently, the Meta CEO predicted the rise of “increasingly immersive content” beyond video, claiming, “we’re just about due for this next major transition” to smart glasses that blend “the physical and digital world together.”

It remains to be seen, though, how much consumer demand exists for social media to become more like an augmented reality game.

Perhaps the future of social media is group chat apps like Geneva, Internet 1.0-aping “social magazines” like Perfectly Imperfect, or subscription-based micro-communities on Patreon built around shared interests in a podcast or creator.

On a long enough timeline, though, every done-to-death trend becomes ripe for renewal. (See: our reboot-filled box office, or Uber’s obsession with reinventing the bus.) It may just be a matter of time before user fatigue from connecting with people across disparate sites and apps leads a Silicon Valley wunderkind to bring everyone together in a massive digital community. Sort of like a social network.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91386830/meta-social-media-ftc-monopoly-response?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss