Following the conclusion of the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial, documents released by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have provided additional insight into Meta’s internal challenges in maintaining Facebook’s relevance. Emails from 2022 reveal that Meta executives explored various strategies to revitalize Facebook, acknowledging a decline in its cultural significance.

As of 2025, Meta continues to address this issue. During the company’s Q4 earnings call in January, Mark Zuckerberg expressed the desire to restore Facebook’s cultural relevance this year by reverting to the original “OG Facebook” concept. One of the measures taken to achieve this goal is the recent launch of a revamped Friends tab.

A series of messages from April 2022, presented as evidence during the trial, reveal Zuckerberg’s concerns regarding Facebook’s outdated “Friends” structure and format, as other prominent platforms focus on the “Following” feature.

Zuckerberg contemplated abandoning the Friends format and even proposed deleting all Facebook friends and having users start anew.

Key points from Mark Zuckerberg’s emails are summarized below.

Concerns around Facebook losing cultural relevance

• “I aim to ensure we have a unique vision for the FB app that can lead to sustained growth over time. Although the FB app’s engagement remains steady in many areas, its cultural relevance appears to be declining rapidly, and I worry this may be an indicator of future health issues. Even if Instagram and WhatsApp perform well, I don’t see a path for our company to succeed without Facebook thriving, so we must get this right.”
• “My theory is that we need to refresh the graph structure of FB to regain cultural relevance and a better long-term path.”
• “I believe we need to find a strategy that doesn’t leave one service relying on the other’s leftovers or artificially constraining itself. Currently, Instagram is doing well in terms of cultural relevance, while Facebook is not, so I’m focused on finding a reasonable path for Facebook’s long-term success.”

Worrying that Facebook’s “friending” structure is outdated

• “The FB app owns the concept of friending, so if we can refresh this and make it a more relevant part of life in the 2020s, this could be a good path.”
• “Friending seems out of fashion right now for several reasons. First, many people’s friend graphs are stale and don’t include the people they want to hear from or connect with. Second, it feels cumbersome to request someone new as a friend, making it hard to rectify the first issue. Most of the time when I meet someone or become interested in someone, I just want to follow them first but not ask anything of them. Third, since FB doesn’t feel as culturally relevant, that adds further weight to adding some on FB vs other services.”
• “It seems to me like the FB app’s position in cultural relevance is deeply tied to the friend graph structure as opposed to other organizing principles — for example, IG/Twitter-style follow graphs, TikTok-style pure algorithmic approach, Groups/Reddit-style communities, etc.”

Proposed solutions

• “Every other modern social network is built on following rather than friending, so it’s possible that the FB app is outdated because it never adopted this fundamental innovation. To rectify this, we could fully adopt following. If we wanted to do this, I don’t think simply supporting following for public accounts would be sufficient. I think we’d have to switch from friending to following on private accounts as well and probably get rid of the concept of liking pages.”
• “One potentially radical idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again. This obviously carries the risk that if we did that, many people might not rebuild their graphs or become less engaged, so if we wanted to consider this, we’d have to build out an experiment and test it in a smaller country to ensure it led to a positive result. I think we’d need to do something relatively extreme like this to make a significant impact, and I don’t think small changes like spring cleaning flows would be enough.”