Instagram co-founder: Zuckerberg saw us as a ‘threat’ to Facebook
1 min read
Summary
Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, testified on Tuesday in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) case to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, stating that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had withheld resources and constrained Instagram’s growth to avoid harming Facebook’s engagement.
Systrom further claimed that Zuckerberg ended feature integrations between the two platforms because he did not want Instagram to grow at Facebook’s expense and that Zuckerberg was ‘very happy to have Instagram in the family’ but ultimately wanted to protect the success of his own platform.
Systrom also stated that following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Instagram received ‘zero’ of the billions of dollars pledged by Zuckerberg to spend on trust and safety resources, whilst also detailing how Zuckerberg yanked members of the Facebook growth team who had been deployed to help Instagram.