Tech Desk 
Apr 16, 2025
An undated image. — Unsplash
In the latest turn of events involving the landmark trial against Meta in the US, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a significant acknowledgement of why he bought Insagram.
Zuckerberg noted that Facebook acquired Instagram partly because of the popular social media app had a superior camera feature compared to the one in Facebook.
“We were doing a build vs. buy analysis,” Zuckerberg told the court. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
According to Reuters, the Meta CEO also admitted that most of the company's attempts to build new apps had failed. He remarked that “building a new app is hard,” adding that the company "tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company and the majority of them don't go anywhere."
Under the trial, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused Meta of unethically monoplising the competition by taking over rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp — a strategy it refered to as “buy or bury.”
While FTC is striving to connect all the dots surrounding the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram by the then Facebook, Zuckerberg’s testimony appears to be validating FTC's argument that Meta tried to suppress competition during the early social media boom.
