Former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg testified in a landmark antitrust case Wednesday that the company considered blocking advertisements from emerging competitors on Facebook.
Sandberg was quizzed amid claims by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to squash competition and establish an illegal monopoly to maintain its dominance in the social media market.
Facebook bought Instagram, a photo-sharing app with no ads, for $1 billion in 2012, while two years later, it purchased the messaging app WhatsApp for $22 billion.
Sandberg acknowledged that Meta considered blocking ads from competing platforms on Facebook, such as Google Plus, KakaoTalk and LINE. She was questioned about a 2011 message she sent to staffers after Google launched Google Plus in which she called Google Plus “real competition.”
During testimony on Wednesday, she characterized the comment as motivation for her team and not as an admission of market threat.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that he bought Instagram and WhatsApp because he saw value in the companies and not to take out competitors.
