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On Thursday, the Oversight Board overturned Meta’s decision to leave up a Facebook post showing an AI deepfake of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo Nazário in an ad for a gambling app. The ad was viewed more than 600,000 times and received more than 50 reports.

That’s the message from Meta’s next witness, Catherine Tucker, an MIT management and marketing professor with expertise in digital monetization strategies. Tucker argues it’s important to account for this kind of competition because it’s the crux of how Meta makes money.

Government attorney Mitchell London points out that List’s “natural experiment” about how consumers behaved when India banned TikTok leaves out some potentially important context. He notes that 58 other apps, including popular messaging and social app WeChat, were banned alongside TikTok — meaning there were fewer alternative apps for consumers to turn to. List says TikTok made up the vast majority of usage prior to the app bans. But London also points to a Meta document that says, “In emerging markets, especially India, Facebook often serves a completely different purpose.”

On cross examination, the FTC interrogates List’s finding that Google Chrome is the top app users go to when they’re incentivized to spend less time on Facebook. List says he didn’t focus on the app as much as YouTube and TikTok since “it’s a little like off-device time has an infinite number of things you can do.” The FTC seems to be suggesting that this is exactly the point — and why evaluating Facebook’s relevant competitors based on where users shift their time is an imperfect measure.

Had the two never merged, List testifies that each company would have likely given in more to advertiser demand for more ads, not less, as the FTC has claimed. He says that over the long run, advertiser-side incentives would win out over incentivizing user engagement if the two remained separate, since one platform couldn’t recoup lower revenue from the other. He claims this is “the direct opposite result” from what the FTC’s expert found.

List uses the “natural experiment” that booted 200 million TikTok users from the app to argue that consumers see it as a fitting substitute for Meta’s apps. Within about two weeks of the ban, he says, Facebook and Instagram saw 20 percent increases in time spent on their apps. This means, according to his analysis, that TikTok should be considered a relevant competitor to Meta.

In List’s experiment, Instagram users who were incentivized to reduce their usage of the app diverted their time to YouTube more than other apps he tracked. The video app saw an 18.9 percent diversion rate, while Snapchat, which the FTC says Instagram directly competes with, sees a 2.2 percent diversion rate. Facebook users incentivized to lower their usage diverted the greatest share of their time to Google Chrome at a rate of 9.3 percent.

List makes this argument using a pricing experiment he ran where he paid a treatment group $4 for each hour they reduced their usage of Facebook and Instagram. The FTC has argued these apps have unique features that users greatly value to help them connect with friends and family. But List found that participants decreased their usage of Facebook and Instagram’s friends and family features about as much as all its other features – showing users don’t particularly value those features more than other ones the apps have to offer.

University of Chicago professor John List, who previously served as chief economist at Uber and Lyft, is now on the stand to try to dismantle the FTC’s market definition of personal social networking services, and dispute its claim that “friends and family sharing” is a core use case for Facebook and Instagram. He tells the court that MeWe, a small competitor in the market Meta allegedly monopolizes, is “economically inconsequential.”

Alison testifies that he’s concerned about short-form video content being “commoditized,” since creators can post across many different apps. Still, he sees building Reels as a huge engineering undertaking and investment that was existential for the future of the business.“If we didn’t invest in Reels, then long term, our entire business was probably going to go down significantly,” he says. “We were really believing that this was going to be the future of our business.”

As the app grew early in the pandemic, Alison says, “we were very surprised by how much time people were spending on TikTok.” Meta found that number was roughly 120 minutes per user, per day.

When Matheson points out that Facebook still prompts users to log in or sign up to connect with friends, family, and people they know, Alison cautions that “just because something is on our website doesn’t mean that it’s completely up to date,” since they’re working to update how they describe the brand. He adds during cross-examination that “people are coming to Facebook for several other things besides friends” and it’s in the middle of an evolutions of how to describe the app.

Matheson describes at a high level a publicly-redacted experiment from a 2021 presentation. Facebook found the experiment increased the amount of original content users shared to their feeds, but time spent on the app went down. Matheson says this would be bad for Facebook because if users see all their friends’ posts and don’t come back, it can’t serve them as many ads. Alison says that the number of times a day users opened the app also declined, as did its “meaningful social interaction” score — so another interpretation is that users would miss content they care even more about, like that from a support group.

That’s how Boasberg interprets the new feature that consolidates friends’ posts into one feed. “This arguably could also enable you on the feed to diminish further the number of friend posts because to the extent people say, ‘hey, I want to see more friend posts,’ the answer is, ‘just go to the tab, it’s all there,” Boasberg says. “And then if in fact the demand is really for unconnected content, then this sort of lets you have your cake and eat it too.” Alison says the decline in friend content is mostly due to users posting less to their feed, not Facebook’s own decisions.

Alison describes it as “a nice feature” for Facebook users who want it but no longer the “main character.”

That’s why Facebook created the friends tab to consolidate posts from users’ connections in one place. As Facebook now recommends more posts and videos from content creators and other accounts users aren’t connected with, Alison says that if a user really wanted to see every post from their friends in the regular feed, “you might have to scroll through 10,000 posts,” even if there’s only 10-20 new friend posts to see.

Facebook recently introduced a friends tab to try to recreate the feeling of scrolling your News Feed circa 2006. Alison says they think “there are some features from the very early days of Facebook and social networking that could become more interesting again” as apps including Facebook move toward public, algorithmically-recommended content. He describes it as an “experiment or a bet that we’re making to almost bring a little bit of nostalgia to Facebook as the core experience goes away from friends.”

In an interview published in October 2022, Alison told Wired’s Steven Levy that “Facebook is still at its core about friends and family.” But Alison testifies that if he were to redo the interview today, “I would acknowledge that there are a large number of people who are not using Facebook to connect with friends and family.” He adds that the world has changed so much that “we are seeing that not to be as true today as it felt two and half years ago when this interview took place.”

This was true even as the app built out its discovery engine, which powers algorithmic recommendations of content from users who are connected with one another, Alison testifies. The FTC is using Alison’s testimony to establish that in the past few years and through today, a sizable number of users still come to Facebook to connect with their friends, and the company recognizes this even as it expands into other use cases. Still, Alison says, Facebook now thinks about facilitating connections as inclusive of people users don’t know in real life, including content creators.

Not everyone who joins Facebook these days does so to find their friends on the service, Alison says. He testifies there’s a “growing” number of people who join the app with no friends, and don’t see any friend content on the app. Meta has argued that connecting with friends is an increasingly smaller portion of what users come to its apps for. The FTC says that as an absolute number, there’s still a sizable number of users who do want to connect with friends, and Facebook and Instagram are virtually the only games in town.

Alison downplays how much users care about connecting with their Facebook friends versus other potential connections, like content creators. “I have friends I haven’t seen in 30 years or I met once at a party that I don’t care about,” he says.

It’s not enough to look at what users say they want from Facebook, Alison says, you also have to look at what their actions tell you about what they want. Just because users say in surveys they want to see more friend content, doesn’t mean that’s how it plays out. “When people actually got more friend content on Facebook they visited Facebook less,” he testifies.

Alison is expected to be one of the FTC’s last major witnesses in its case-in-chief. The FTC’s lead attorney Dan Matheson is driving home the point that Meta knows that people want to see posts from their friends when they come to Facebook, by looking at a 2021 internal presentation where it found in a survey that “3 of the 4 top user pain points were related to friend content.”

Meta, which purports to be a leader in AI, has been unable to stop the proliferation of deepfake advertisements impersonating Financial Times writer Martin Wolf on Facebook and Instagram. “Is it really that hard or are they not trying, as Sarah Wynn-Williams suggests in her excellent book Careless People?” Wolf asks. There’s also a fairly incredible graph showing the number of deepfakes skyrocketing after the FT told Meta about the scam. This article isn’t behind FT’s paywall— and it’s definitely worth your time.

For those of you who don’t know Latin: Zuck’s tee is “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “Zuck or nothing.” Graber’s tee is “mundus sine caesaribus,” or “a world without Caesars.” We love a woman who can shitpost IRL.

Contrary to what Facebook ad scams are promoting via deepfake videos of Fox News personalities, Musk hasn’t discovered “one simple trick” to reverse the blood sugar condition. Most of these ads, which Engadget started noticing in early February, are linking viewers to unproven supplements that “big pharma” doesn’t want you to see.

Users on a Facebook group for Cybertruck owners are posting about public backlash being directed towards their vehicles, showing people flicking them off and lewd or abusive messages they’ve received.

Meta has ditched the pink/purple hued design it introduced in 2020 and replaced it with a more boring version.

During Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call today, Mark Zuckerberg kept dropping hints about big plans for Facebook. He’s focused on making it more “culturally influential.” He even suggested that some changes could hurt the business in the short term. The goal is to “get back to how Facebook was used back in the day.” So, more of stalking your classmates and less AI Shrimp Jesus?