This week, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in an antitrust trial that might outcome within the breakup of Meta’s social networking empire. It is likely to be years earlier than the practically 3 billion customers of the corporate’s flagship app Fb—recognized internally because the Blue app—be taught the destiny of the service they nonetheless use, regardless of the fixed obituaries. (For the report, two years in the past, Tom Alison, who heads the service, issued an announcement affirming “Fb just isn’t lifeless nor dying.”) However with all of the hubbub surrounding the trial, Fb customers may need missed probably the most important information about Blue in years. On March 27, 2025, the 21-year-old firm quietly introduced a brand new function on its cellular app: an choice that may give customers the novel expertise of seeing their mates’ content material on Fb. Lastly, there was an alternative choice to a information feed overwhelmed with rubbish, gossip, and influencer movies that folks don’t essentially ask for however can’t resist clicking on after which feeling dangerous about. By finding and choosing the Mates tab, your feed will populate completely with posts from folks you realize in actual life and that you’ve got chosen to attach with. You would possibly even name it a social app. Think about!
The corporate’s clarification is telling. “Over time, Fb advanced to satisfy altering wants…” learn the press launch, “however the magic of mates has fallen away.” I marvel on the passive voice. Meta’s valuation is over a trillion. It has linked practically half of humanity—all due to the facility of individuals wanting to maintain up with family and friends. And by some means, the corporate’s core function of connecting mates simply … fell away? Did the 1000’s of engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and managers engaged on Fb simply wake someday and say, “Hey, has anybody seen the stuff that’s the very cause we’re an organization?”
No, this didn’t simply occur. Take into account that, in that 2023 press launch about Fb not being lifeless, Alison listed the priorities for the app that yr, together with “synthetic intelligence, messaging, creators and monetization.” Not a phrase about boosting good friend content material, regardless that Meta executives knew that folks needed to see simply that. It got here out in courtroom that for years Zuckerberg has been conscious that his customers crave listening to extra from their mates. A Meta survey in 2020 discovered that 61 % of customers needed extra good friend posts, and 66 % needed to see a wider variety of posts amongst their mates. A yr later, one other survey reported that three out of the highest 4 “ache factors” on Fb had been as a consequence of what the Federal Commerce Fee known as “decreased funding in family and friends sharing.”
Right here’s one clarification for this. Content material from influencers, political activists, and pretend information organizations is extra worthwhile and retains folks on the service longer. Misinformation from a stranger is value extra to Meta than household updates and journey images from mates. These don’t often go viral. That’s why, when Alison wrote about AI, he didn’t imply utilizing it to search out what your folks are saying however to attach you with creators who’re posting to spice up their very own wallets, with the assistance of Fb monetization. On the stand, Zuckerberg provided a unique clarification for the change: Folks started sharing on messaging apps as a substitute of social platforms. However might it’s that the rationale that they stopped sharing on Fb was that each one these poisonous posts from strangers made the platform disagreeable?
Zuckerberg was slippery when it got here to admitting that he purchased Instagram and WhatsApp to get rid of competitors—a key concern within the trial. However he was frank in acknowledging that the mission of the corporate has veered dramatically from the unique feel-good campaign to attach people. It’s now as a lot an leisure firm as a social community, he says. A chart shared by Meta confirmed that leisure had overwhelmed social content material. In 2025, Fb customers spent solely 17 % of their time taking a look at content material shared from mates. That’s not as a result of they like to learn stuff from influencers and anger-boosters—bear in mind, Meta’s personal surveys present that customers are dying to see stuff from folks they know. But Zuckerberg matter-of-factly famous that on the subject of good friend content material, “That a part of what we do hasn’t actually grown.” Once more, the passive voice!
Given the starvation folks should see good friend posts, one would possibly anticipate that the talents of Meta’s proficient workforce could be employed to maximise the worth of human connections. For a few years, it was. Within the early 2010s, I used to be ceaselessly known as to Mark Zuckerberg’s convention room, dubbed the Aquarium, to see some attention-grabbing challenge meant to extend the worth of the social community. A few of these tasks didn’t work out—bear in mind graph search?—however they had been sincere makes an attempt at fulfilling the corporate mission. As the last decade progressed, the social facet of Fb grew to become much less of a precedence for Zuckerberg, and his ardour shifted to digital actuality and synthetic intelligence.