Uncovered emails showed how Meta struggled to keep Facebook culturally relevant

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With the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, documents shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offered more insight into Meta’s internal struggles to keep Facebook relevant. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled different visions for Facebook’s future to boost its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was decreasing.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Meta is still grappling with this issue. Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s Q4 earnings call in January that the company wants to restore Facebook’s cultural relevance this year with a return to “OG Facebook.” Part of its solution for this problem is the recent launch of a revamped Friends tab.

In a series of messages from April 2022, which were shared as evidence during the trial, Zuckerberg discussed concerns about Facebook’s “Friends” structure and format being outdated as every other major platform focused on “Following.”

He considered ditching the Friends format and even suggested deleting everyone’s Facebook friends and having them start again.

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

Concerns around Facebook losing cultural relevance

“I want to make sure we have a unique vision for the FB app that can lead to sustainable growth over time. Even though the FB app’s engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly and I worry that this may be a leading indicator of future health issues. Even if IG and WA do well, I don’t see a path for our company to succeed in the way we need if FB falters, so we need to get this right.”
“My theory is that we need to refresh the graph structure of FB in order for it to gain cultural relevance and a better long term path.”
“I think we need to find a strategy that doesn’t leave one service picking up the scraps the other service leaves behind or having either service artificially or unreasonably constrain itself. Right now IG is doing well on cultural relevance and FB isn’t, so I’m more focused on figuring out a reasonable path for FB longer term.”

Worrying that Facebook’s “friending” structure is outdated

“The FB app owns the concept of friending, so if there were a way to freshen this up and make it a more relevant part of life in the 2020s then this could be a good path.”
“Friending feels out of vogue right now for at least a few reasons. First, a lot of people’s friend graphs are stale and not filled with the people they want to hear from or connect with. Second, it feels heavyweight to request someone new as a friend, which makes 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, and related, since FB doesn’t feel as culturally relevant, that adds further weight to adding some on FB vs other services.”
“It feels 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 its seems possible that the FB app is just outdated because it never adopted this fundamental innovation. The way to rectify this would be to fully adopt following. If we wanted to do this, I don’t think that 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 (even though this would work similarly for those accounts) and we’d probably want to get rid of the concept of liking pages as well.”
“One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again. This obviously carries the risk that if we did that then a lot of people just wouldn’t rebuild their graphs or would 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 make sure it led to a positive result. I think we’d need to do something relatively extreme like this to move the needle though and I don’t think small things like spring cleaning flows would move the needle.”