Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has considered de-friending everyone on Facebook in a bid to boost the social network's cultural relevance. The executive called the “potentially crazy idea” at the timewas revealed on Monday, as part of the evidence presented on the first day of the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against Meta.
In 2022, Zuckerberg proposed the strategy of "clearing everyone's friend relationships and letting them start over" in an email to Meta employees as a possible solution to Facebook's declining influence in the social network field. The idea is that forcing everyone to re-create the friend relationship graph can encourage users to rejoin Meta while rebuilding social relationships.
Others at Meta, including Facebook head Tom Alison, opposed the plan, and ultimately the strategy was never implemented.
However, evidence presented at the trial suggested that Zuckerberg had considered other strategies to keep the company relevant, including shifting Facebook from a friend-based to a fan-based model. But that never came to fruition either.
In recent weeks, Facebook has once again focused on connecting friends and revamped its Friends tab in an effort to return to the "OG Facebook." The new tab centralizes friend requests and your friends' content, including their posts, videos, stories, and birthdays.
"I think there's a lot of opportunity to make [Facebook] even more culturally influential than it is now," Zuckerberg told investors during Meta's fourth-quarter 2024 earnings call, outlining his top goals for the year ahead. "I think some of these goals will go back to the way Facebook was originally used."