US: Zuckerberg defends buying Instagram

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered some of his first public comments on his company’s controversial decision to buy Instagram amid intensifying scrutiny over Facebook’s power and market dominance, reported The Hill. 

During a quarterly call with investors, Zuckerberg said he believes many of the recently launched antitrust investigations into Facebook “are going to be about our acquisition of Instagram.”

He spent several minutes laying out Facebook’s view on why it acquired Instagram, a popular image-sharing platform, in 2012.

“If it’s helpful, I’ll go back to what it was like at the time,” Zuckerberg said, responding to an investor’s question about government scrutiny of its market dominance. 

“In 2012, we didn’t think about Instagram as competing with our core service,” he said, referring to Instagram as a “complementary” service to Facebook’s main app. He said the company hoped at the time it would reach 100 million users.

Instagram reached 1 billion monthly active users in 2018. “I know it can be really hard, given how well things have gone, to look back and remember what the world was like when we made this acquisition,” Zuckerberg said. “We ultimately thought we were going to do better work if we were building with Instagram.”

Critics have accused Facebook of quashing an up-and-coming competitor with its decision to buy Instagram, a platform that is popular with young people.

Full Content: The Hill

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