INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads
Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click
ads.Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into
rivals had Meta not acquired them.The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off
to spam" before Meta bought it.Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza,"
Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally
irrelevant."Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr
and monetizing with great success."In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social
media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app
And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta
