Uncovered emails showed how Meta struggled to keep Facebook culturally relevant

With the first week of Meta’s anti -monopoly trial, the documents shared by the US Federal Trade Committee (FTC) presented more insight into Meta’s internal struggles to maintain Facebook. In emails from 2022, META executives have developed different visions for the future of Facebook to enhance his success, while admitting that its cultural importance is decreasing.

Fast forward until 2025, and is still fighting with this problem. Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s profit call in the four -quarter in January that the company wants to restore cultural importance on Facebook this year with a return to “OG Facebook”. Part of its solution to this problem is to launch a recently renewed friends tab.

In a series of messages from April 2022, which was shared as a guide during the trial, Zuckerberg discussed concerns about the “Friends” structure on Facebook and coordinated in the past where each other major platform focuses on “follow -up”.

He thought about getting rid of friend coordination, and even suggested deleting Facebook friends and starting again.

Some outstanding points of Mark Zuckerberg emails below.

Fears about Facebook loss of cultural importance

• “I want to make sure that we have a unique vision of the FB application that can lead to sustainable growth over time. Although sharing the FB application is fixed in many places, it seems that its cultural importance is decreasing quickly and I am afraid that this is an indication of future health problems.
• “My theory is that we need to update the fB graph structure in order to obtain cultural importance and a better long path.”
• “I think we need to find a strategy that does not leave a single service that picks up scraps left by the other service behind it or either to be artificial or unreasonable. At the present time, IG works well on cultural importance, and FB is not, so I am more focused on discovering a long -term path in the long run.”

Anxiety that the structure of “friendship” in Facebook is outdated

• “The FB app has the concept of friendship, so if there is a way to activate this matter and make it more important than life in the twenties of the last century, this may be a good path.”
• “Friendship feels out of Vogue at the present time for at least several reasons. First, many of the graphs of my friends are meaningless and do not fill them with people who want to hear or communicate with them. Secondly, heavy weight feels that I ask a new person as a friend, which makes it difficult something. Since FB does not feel culturally suitable, this adds more weight to the addition of some to FB against other services. “
• “It seems to me that the FB application position in cultural importance is deeply linked to the structure of friends of friends instead of other organizational principles-for example, following the graphs similar to IG/Twitter, and the method of pure algorithms similar to Tiktok, groups/societies in the Reddit style, etc.”

Suggested solutions

• “Every other modern social network is based on its followers instead of a friend, so it seems that the FB application can be old because this basic innovation has never adopted. The way to correct this will be to fully adopt follow -up.
• “One of the ideas that are likely to be crazy is to think about wiping the graphs for everyone and starting them again. This is clearly that if we do so, many people will not rebuild their graphs or will become less involved, so we want to think about it, we will have to look at this cleaning, we will have to need to move in the experience. Stir the needle.”