Mark Zuckerberg Admits TikTok Is a Threat to Meta's Growth

April 19, 2025 | 04:12 pm

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that TikTok’s success was a risk to Meta, in a testimony at an antitrust trial at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held Wednesday, April 16, 2025, local time.

Zuckerberg said that TikTok's presence since 2018 had become Meta's main focus. He said the ByteDance's app was a 'top priority' and a 'highly urgent' competitive threat in the social industry.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg stated that TikTok's popularity had a direct impact on Meta. “Our growth slowed down dramatically,” he said when explaining TikTok's influence on the company's performance, quoted from the TechCrunch report, Saturday, April 19, 2025. He said that TikTok has continued to be Meta's main concern in an effort to maintain its competitiveness over the past few years.

TikTok began to dominate the market after ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017 and merged it with TikTok the following year. Shortly after that, Meta - then still called Facebook - stopped reporting the number of individual Facebook users and switched to a 'family of apps' metric that included Instagram and WhatsApp. This change was considered a strategy to disguise the slowing growth of their main application.

During the hearing, Zuckerberg also highlighted the changing function of social media. “The apps now serve primarily as discovery engines. People can take that content to messaging engines,” he said. 

However, Meta is now working to return to Facebook's early roots. The company has launched a number of new features to strengthen interactions between users, including an updated Friends tab that highlights friend requests and friend activity. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg stated that 'return to OG Facebookk' was one of the company's key goals for 2025. 

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