meta Platforms, Inc. faces an uphill battle in restoring Facebook’s cultural relevance, a challenge highlighted by internal documents revealed during an antitrust trial brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These documents,dating back to 2022,expose concerns among Meta executives about Facebook’s declining influence and the need for a strategic overhaul.

The Quest for “OG Facebook”

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive officer, addressed the issue directly during the company’s Q4 earnings call in January 2025. He expressed a desire to restore Facebook’s cultural relevance this year by returning to OG Facebook. This initiative includes the recent launch of a revamped Friends tab, signaling a shift towards reconnecting with the platform’s original focus.

Zuckerberg’s 2022 Concerns: A Deep Dive

Emails from april 2022, presented as evidence in the trial, reveal Zuckerberg’s anxieties about Facebook’s outdated “Friends” structure. he noted that other major platforms were prioritizing “Following” models. Zuckerberg even considered drastic measures, including deleting everyone’s Facebook friends and having them start anew.

Internal Memos: Key Concerns

Zuckerberg’s emails highlighted several critical issues:

• Cultural Relevance: I wont 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 manny 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.
• Graph Structure: 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.
• Service Synergy: 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.

The “Friending” Dilemma

Zuckerberg questioned the relevance of Facebook’s core “friending” concept in the modern social media landscape:

• Relevance: 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.
• Outdated Structure: 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.
• core Issue: 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.

Potential Solutions: A Radical Overhaul?

Zuckerberg explored several potential solutions, some quite radical:

• Embrace Following: 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 basic 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.
• The “Crazy Idea”:
  

  One possibly 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.