With the first week of Meta’s Antitrust -hearing Behind us, documents shared through the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more insight into Meta’s internal struggle to keep Facebook relevant. In e -mails from 2022, the managers of Meta different visions for Facebook’s future have to increase its success, and acknowledge that its cultural relevance has decreased.

Fast forward to 2025, and Meta is still struggling with this problem. Mark Zuckerberg said in January during the company’s Q4 earnings call that the company wants to recover Facebook’s cultural relevance this year with a return to ‘OG Facebook’. Part of the solution to this problem is the recent introduction of a revamped friends tab.

In a series of messages from April 2022, shared as evidence during the hearing, Zuckerberg discussed the concerns about Facebook’s “friends” structure and format, because every other major platform is focused on ‘next’.

He considered removing the Friends format and even suggested that everyone’s Facebook friends be removed and let them start again.

Some of the highlights from Mark Zuckerberg’s email are below.

Concerns about Facebook that loses cultural relevance

• “I want to make sure we have a unique vision for the FB app that can lead to sustainable growth over time. Although the involvement of the FB app is steady in many places, it feels as if the cultural relevance is declining quickly, and I am concerned that it may be a leading indication of future health issues. Even if well, I shouldn’t see a way for our company. “
• “My theory is that we must refresh the graphic structure of FB so that it should get cultural relevance and a better long -term road.”
• ‘I think we should find a strategy that does not make up one service that leaves the other service or artificially or unreasonably limits the service. At the moment IG is doing well on cultural relevance and FB is not, so I am more focused on a reasonable path for FB longer term. “

Worry that Facebook’s “Friending” structure is outdated

• “The FB app owns the concept of friendly, so if there was a way to freshen up and make it a more relevant part of life in the 2020s, it could be a good path.”
• “Girlfriend feels out of fashion for at least a few reasons at the moment. First, many people’s friend graphs are outdated and are not filled with the people they want to hear or make contact. Secondly, it feels heavyweight to request someone new as a friend, making it difficult to fix the first problem. Most of the time when I meet someone or to be interested, I want to follow them first but ask nothing of them, and it is, and related, Since FB does not feel so culturally relevant, it adds further weight to the addition of some of FB vs other services. “
• “It feels to me that the position of the FB app in cultural relevance is deeply linked to the friend graph structure as opposed to other organizing principles-for example, IG/Twitter style follows graphs, tapping style pure algorithmic approach, groups/reddit-style communities, etc.”

Proposed solutions

• ‘Every other modern social network is built on the next rather than friendly, so it seems possible that the FB app is just outdated because it never adopted this fundamental innovation. The way to fix it would be to fully adopt it. If we want to do this, I do not think that the support of the following accounts would be. I would think that we would like to follow it, and that it would be good to do the concepts) and that we want to do so) and that we will do so) and that it will be equal to the report) of pages as well. “
• “A potential crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and letting them go again. Of course, this poses the risk that if we were to do so, many people would not rebuild their graphs, or be less engaged, so if we wanted to consider it, we would have to build an experiment and test it in a smaller country to make sure it should be to a positive result. would move the needle. “