(Bloomberg) — Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc., faced sharp questioning from the US Federal Trade Commission as its second witness in a trial to break up the social media giant.
Sandberg, who left Meta in 2022 after more than 14 years as Mark Zuckerberg’s No. 2, was Meta’s senior-most business leader at the time the company acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp, giving her key insight into its strategy. The FTC argues that those deals — completed in 2012 and 2014, respectively — gave Meta a monopoly on the social networking industry and should be undone.
The FTC quickly moved to undermine Sandberg’s credibility. FTC lawyer Susan Musser started off by trying to establish that people primarily use the company’s services to stay connected with friends and family, the part of the social media market the agency says Meta has illegally monopolized.
Sandberg first said that a majority of Facebook’s users were “probably not” using the service for that purpose by the time she left the company. She quickly changed her answer, however, when presented with deposition testimony from September 2022 where she said, “I think it’s the majority of what people do.”
According to past internal emails, at the time of the Instagram deal, Zuckerberg asked Sandberg whether Meta overpaid for the photo-sharing app, which it offered $1 billion for. She replied, “Yes, of course it’s way too much.” On the stand Wednesday, Sandberg felt differently. “I don’t think anyone today would say we paid too much for Instagram,” she said.
Meta has pushed back aggressively against the FTC’s monopoly claims, saying that it was able to help Instagram and WhatsApp grow bigger than they ever could have on their own. Meta also refutes FTC claims that it dominates social networking, arguing that it competes intensely with a variety of platforms, including ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat, Google’s YouTube, Apple Inc.’s iMessage and Elon Musk’s X.
Sandberg joined the fledgling company, then known as Facebook Inc., in 2008 after building Alphabet Inc.’s Google search advertising business. Her arrival marked a significant moment for Facebook as she brought meaningful management experience to the company just as it was starting to build its own advertising business under Zuckerberg, who was 23 years old when she joined.
As Meta’s second-in-command, Sandberg was involved in many of the discussions around acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp and has appeared in several emails and other internal documents presented during the first three days of the trial, which started Monday. Like Zuckerberg, Sandberg is viewed by both sides as a key witness and started off her testimony under questioning by the FTC, which challenged her on some of Meta’s prior business decisions.
In an effort to show Meta’s monopoly power in the social media market, Musser showed Sandberg a board presentation from March 2018, shortly after the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. According to the document, a metric used by the company to measure user satisfaction declined. However, there was “no visible impact to core engagement metrics” — a signal to the FTC that consumers didn’t have other options.
Sandberg was also asked about ways the company tried to disadvantage competitors, particularly by blocking their advertisements on Facebook.
In a July 2011 message from Sandberg to company employees discussing the launch of Google’s social networking service, Google , she wrote that “the most important thing to acknowledge is that for the first time we have real competition and consumers have real choice.” The next year, Sandberg and Zuckerberg discussed whether to block ads promoting Google . “I would block Google,” Sandberg wrote in a message from August 2012.
Sandberg tried to reshape her comments about Google being Meta’s only real competitor from the stand on Wednesday. “I said that to rally the troops,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a fair reading of history. People never had a direct copy of our product before.”
Zuckerberg wrapped up his testimony earlier on Wednesday, after three days on the stand. He spent most of that time under tense questioning by the FTC’s lawyer, Daniel Matheson, who challenged him to defend his company’s acquisition strategy and argued that Meta deliberately sought to buy competitors rather than compete with them.
While Sandberg wasn’t always closely involved in the company’s product decisions, she did spearhead Meta’s efforts to turn a profit and oversaw its advertising business. A key part of the FTC’s case is an allegation that consumers were harmed by Meta’s acquisitions. FTC lawyers have argued that Meta degraded the quality of the apps by increasing the number of ads and watering down users’ data privacy protections.
Given her role running Meta’s advertising operations, Sandberg is expected to field additional questions on Thursday about whether Meta’s business decisions harmed users of WhatsApp and Instagram.
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