You're not imagining it — you're definitely seeing less of your friends' content on Facebook and Instagram.
The decline in friend-focused content is playing a central role in a landmark antitrust trial between Meta and the Federal Trade Commission underway in Washington, DC.
The FTC has accused Meta of monopolizing the personal social networking market by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralize future threats. The trial could lead to a court-ordered company breakup or mark a major defeat for the FTC's aggressive approach to Big Tech.
Meta, for its part, argues that its platforms face fierce competition from apps such as TikTok and YouTube and that consumer behavior — not anticompetitive conduct — is behind the way people use Facebook and Instagram today.
Part of Meta's testimony on Monday centered on the fact that people just weren't "broadcasting" content to their friends on Facebook and Instagram as much as they used to.
"The friend part has gone down quite a bit," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during Monday's trial, adding that Facebook in particular had "turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space."
In one slide of Meta's opening statement presentation, the company says the "time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" has declined. In 2023, the time spent viewing friends' content was 22% on Facebook and 11% on Instagram. This year, that timeshare has dropped to 17% and 7%, respectively.
That's due in part to Meta's prioritization of short-form video and changes in how it recommends content to users.
In recent months, Meta has made a public show of trying to reverse the trend of users seeing fewer friend posts. In March, the company launched a new "friends" tab on Facebook that shows only posts, stories, and reels from people a user actually knows — no recommended content or algorithmic distractions. Zuckerberg has said it's part of a broader effort to bring back "OG Facebook," with a more intimate version of the platform that returns to its roots and focuses on personal connections.
"I think we're going to build some awesome things that shape the future of human connection," he said on the company's last earnings call in January, and later described it on a podcast as "Phase 1 of bringing back OG Facebook."
Instagram, meanwhile, has continued to expand friends-focused features such as "Close Friends," and its top exec, Adam Mosseri, said earlier this year that it would double down on direct messaging in 2025.
In another slide of Meta's opening statement, the company says people are going to DMs to share things with their friends. One slide includes a quote from Mosseri: "I think [Instagram]'s more of a messaging app than a broadcast-sharing app at this point."
The decline in friend content is a key part of Meta's argument that Instagram and Facebook are more entertainment platforms (competing with the likes of TikTok and YouTube) than solely social networks (the FTC specifically names Snapchat and MeWe in its case).
"The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality," a spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider in a statement. "The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others."
Here are four interesting slides from Meta's opening statement:
