Uncovered emails showed how Meta struggled to keep Facebook culturally relevant

As Meta’s antitrust trial entered its second week, new documents released by the U.S Federal Trade Commission shed light on Meta’s ongoing struggle to maintain Facebook’s relevance. Internal emails from 2022 revealed that Meta executives were brainstorming different strategies to revive Facebook’s success, acknowledging a decline in its cultural significance.

Fast forward to 2025, and Meta is still facing the same challenge. During the company’s Q4 earnings call in January, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized Meta’s goal to restore Facebook’s cultural relevance by embracing the essence of “OG Facebook.” One of the steps taken towards this goal was the recent launch of a revamped Friends tab.

In a series of messages from April 2022 presented as evidence in the trial, Zuckerberg expressed concerns about Facebook’s outdated “Friends” structure in comparison to other platforms that focused on “Following.” He even contemplated the idea of abandoning the Friends format and resetting everyone’s friend lists.

Key points from Mark Zuckerberg’s emails include:

Concerns around Facebook losing cultural relevance

• Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the need for a unique vision for the Facebook app to ensure sustainable growth, expressing worries about its diminishing cultural relevance and its impact on the company’s future success.
• He suggested refreshing Facebook’s graph structure to enhance its cultural relevance and secure a better long-term trajectory.
• Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of developing a strategy that allows both Instagram and Facebook to thrive without one service overshadowing the other.

Worrying that Facebook’s “friending” structure is outdated

• Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook’s concept of friending felt outdated in the 2020s, citing reasons such as stale friend lists, the heavyweight nature of friend requests, and the platform’s decreasing cultural relevance.
• He proposed revamping the friend graph structure to align with modern social networking trends based on following rather than friending.
• Zuckerberg suggested considering radical measures like wiping everyone’s friend lists and starting afresh to rejuvenate user engagement.

Proposed solutions

• Zuckerberg proposed transitioning Facebook from a friending model to a following model, aligning with the prevailing trend in modern social networks.
• He floated the idea of conducting an experiment in a smaller country to test the impact of resetting user friend lists, acknowledging the risks associated with such a drastic change.