Sandberg challenged during the FTC hearing about Meta business movements

(Bloomberg) – Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta Platforms Inc. chief operating officer, faced a sharp interrogation of the US Federal Trade Commission as his second witness in a trial to break up social media giant. Sandberg, who left Meta in 2022 after more than 14 years as the number 2 of Mark Zuckerberg, was Meta’s senior business leader when the company acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp, giving her important insight into his strategy. The FTC argues that the transactions – completed in 2012 and 2014 – have given Meta a monopoly on the social networking industry and need to be undone. The FTC moved quickly to undermine Sandberg’s credibility. FTC attorney Susan Musser has begun trying to determine that people mainly use the company’s services to keep in touch with friends and family, the part of the social media market that the agency says that Meta was illegally monopolized. Sandberg first said that a majority of the Facebook users “probably don’t” use the service for the purpose by the time she left the company. However, she quickly changed her answer when she presented with deposition evidence from September 2022, where she said, “I think it’s the majority of what people do.” According to the internal emails in the past, at the time of the Instagram agreement, Zuckerberg Sandberg asked if Meta paid too much for the photo-division app, for which he offered $ 1 billion. She replies, “Yes, of course it’s too much.” On the yard on Wednesday, Sandberg felt different. “I don’t think anyone would say today that we paid too much for Instagram,” she said. Meta has aggressively pushed back against the FTC’s monopoly claims, saying that it could help Instagram and WhatsApp to get bigger than they could ever have on their own. Meta also refuts that FTC claims to dominate social networks, arguing that it competes intensely with a variety of platforms, including Snapchat of BiteDance Ltd., Snap Inc. Snapchat, Google’s YouTube, Apple Inc. The iMessage and Elon Musk’s X. Sandberg searched for the Google’s Google search. Her arrival was an important moment for Facebook, as she brought a significant driving experience to the business, just as he started building his own advertising business under Zuckerberg, who was 23 years old when she joined. As the second commander of Meta, Sandberg was involved in many of the discussions of the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp and appeared in various emails and other internal documents that presented during the first three days of the hearing, which began on Monday. Like Zuckerberg, Sandberg is considered an important witness by both sides and has begun her testimony under interrogation by the FTC, which challenged her about some of the previous business decisions of Meta. In an effort to show Meta’s monopoly power in the social media market, Musser Sandberg showed a board presentation from March 2018, shortly after the Cambridge Analytica Data Privacy scandal. According to the document, a metric used by the company to measure user satisfaction has decreased. However, there was “no visible impact on core engagement statistics” – a signal to the FTC that consumers do not have other options. Sandberg was also asked about ways in which the company tried to harm competitors, especially by blocking their ads on Facebook. In a July 2011 message from Sandberg to employees of the company discussing the launch of Google’s social networking service, Google, she wrote that “the most important thing to admit is that we have real competition for the first time and that consumers have real choice.” The following year, Sandberg and Zuckerberg discuss or block the ads that promotes Google. “I would block Google,” Sandberg wrote in a message of August 2012. Sandberg tried to reform her comments on Google on Wednesday. “I said it to have the troops pulled,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a fair reading of history. People have never had a direct copy of our product before. ” Zuckerberg wrapped his testimony on the yard earlier Wednesday, after three days. He spent most of the time under tense interrogation by FTC’s attorney, Daniel Matheson, who challenged him to defend his company’s procurement strategy and argued that Meta deliberately tried to buy competitors rather than competing with it. While Sandberg was not always involved in the product’s product decisions now, she made Meta’s efforts to make a profit and oversee the advertising business. An important part of the FTC’s case is a claim that consumers have been injured by Meta’s acquisitions. FTC advocates argued that Meta broke down the quality of the apps by increasing the number of ads and watering the privacy of users. Given her role that Meta’s advertising operations manage, Sandberg is expected to harm additional questions about whether Meta’s business decisions have harmed users of WhatsApp and Instagram on Thursday. More stories like these are available on Bloomberg.com © 2025 Bloomberg LP first published: 17 Apr 2025, 03:44 am Ist