In the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial, documents shared by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) provided more insight into Meta’s internal struggle to make Facebook relevant. In a 2022 email, Meta executives pondered various visions for Facebook’s future, boosting its success and acknowledging its cultural relevance is declining.
Fast forward to 2025, and Meta is still working on this issue. Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s fourth quarter revenue call that the company wanted to return to “OG Facebook” to restore Facebook’s cultural relevance. Part of that solution to this problem is the recent release of the Revamped Friends tab.
In a series of messages from April 2022 shared as evidence during the trial, Zuckerberg discussed concerns about the outdated “friends” structure and format on Facebook, as all other major platforms focus on “following.”
He even considered abandoning his friend’s form and even thought about deleting all his Facebook friends and suggesting that they start again.
Some of the highlights of Mark Zuckerberg’s emails can be found below:
Facebook concerns lose cultural relevance
“I want to make sure there is a unique vision for FB apps that can lead to sustainable growth over time. I feel that their cultural relevance is declining rapidly despite FB app engagement being stable in many places. I’m worried that this is a key indicator of future health issues. “My theory is that we need to refresh the graph structure of FB, as this will help you get a better long-term path.” “I think we need to find a strategy where one service doesn’t leave scraps leaving other services behind, and that doesn’t use artificially or unfairly constrained services. Currently, IG is doing well on cultural relevance and FB is focused on grasping the reasonable path of FB long-term.”
I’m worried about Facebook’s “Friending” structure being outdated
“FB app owns the concept of friends, so this could be a good path if there’s a way to wash this down and make it a more relevant part of life in the 2020s.” “Friends now feel out of fashion for at least a few reasons. First, many people’s friend graphs are old and not full of people who want to talk to or want connections. Second, demanding new people as friends feels heavyweight. Add even more weight to adding some to FB and other services.” “FB app’s cultural relevance feels like it’s deeply tied to the graph structure of friends, as opposed to other organizational principles. For example, IG/Twitter style follow graphs, Tiktok style pure algorithmic approach, group/reddit style community, etc.”
The proposed solution
“It seems like FB apps can be outdated as FB apps will never adopt this basic innovation, as all other modern social networks are built on following rather than being friends. The way to correct this is to adopt this entirely. There is also the concept of liking pages.” “One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping all the graphs and starting again. This clearly poses the risk that many people will not rebuild the graphs or become less involved. They will move the needle.”
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