At trial, Instagram co-founder says Meta denied his company resources

WASHINGTON — Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, testified Tuesday in a landmark federal antitrust trial that his startup was starved of resources after Meta bought it because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, was afraid of the success of the photo-sharing app.

“Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth,” Systrom said.

Systrom’s testimony was among the most pointed for the government’s case that Meta had purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a “buy-or-bury strategy” to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals. The Instagram co-founder made millions when Zuckerberg bought his company, but Systrom sharply contradicted Meta’s defense during hours on the stand in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Last week, Zuckerberg testified that the social media giant, formerly known as Facebook, used its deep pockets to invest in Instagram after its purchase.

Systrom countered Tuesday that he left Meta in 2018 because of Zuckerberg’s lack of investment. At that time, Instagram had grown to 1 billion users, about 40% of Facebook’s size, yet the photo-sharing app had only 1,000 employees compared with 35,000 employees at Facebook, he said.

“We were by far the fastest growing team. We produced the most revenue, and relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt like we should have been much larger,” Systrom said.

He said he found the decisions baffling. When asked by a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission why Zuckerberg might have decided to give Instagram fewer resources, Systrom said the Facebook co-founder believed it was a threat to the app he created.

The case, Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, entered its second week Monday and hinges on Meta’s purchases of Instagram, more than a decade ago for $1 billion, and WhatsApp, in 2014 for $19 billion. The government has argued that the acquisitions harmed competition by removing promising startups from the market that could have challenged Meta’s dominance.

Zuckerberg, the first witness called by the FTC, said last week that Meta provided key technological help to Instagram, including spam filtering technology and eventually computing systems to store content and operate the app.

On Tuesday, Systrom said Instagram had spam “under control,” and that the company already had a solid technology infrastructure provided by Amazon.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.