Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once considered deleting everyone’s Facebook friends in an effort to boost the social network’s cultural relevance. This “potentially crazy idea,” as the exec called it at the time, was revealed on Monday as a part of the evidence introduced during the first day of the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against Meta.
In one message to Meta employees in 2022, Zuckerberg proposed the strategy of “wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again” as a possible solution to Facebook’s declining significance in the social networking space. The idea was that forcing everyone to re-create their friend graphs could encourage users to reconnect with the social network as they rebuild their social connections.
Others at Meta, including the head of Facebook, Tom Alison, pushed back on the plan, and ultimately, the strategy was never implemented.
However, the evidence presented in the trial revealed that Zuckerberg had considered other strategies to maintain his company’s relevance, including shifting Facebook from a friends-based model to a follower-based model. That also never came to be.
In recent weeks, Facebook has focused again on connecting friends, having revamped its Friends tab in an effort to return to an “OG Facebook.” The new tab centralizes friend requests and only friends’ content, including their posts, reels, stories, and birthdays.
“I think there are a lot of opportunities to make [Facebook] way more culturally influential than it is today,” Zuckberg told investors during Meta’s Q4 2024 earnings call about his key goals for the year ahead. “I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day.”
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