Social media is dead. Meta has admitted as much. What now?

Back in March, Facebook introduced a new feature that wasn’t exactly new. The Friends tab—described by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as “a throwback to OG Facebook”—is a way for the app’s users to see only the latest posts from friends, and none of the algorithm-recommended content otherwise dominating their feeds. Personal social networking, once Facebook’s core product, had finally been relegated to a nostalgic lark its users could whimsically opt into.

Less than a month later, with its years-in-the-making antitrust trial, the Federal Trade Commission sought to prove Meta’s early-2010s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave it a monopoly on personal social networking sites. Over the course of the trial’s six weeks, Meta’s defense emerged: a precise accounting of why Facebook’s new Frien