Mark Zuckerberg is so desperate to make Facebook relevant again he considered deleting your entire friends list

(Image credit: Getty Images / Cheng Xin)

Facebook's antitrust trial in Washington D.C. is into its second week. And along with the usual reams of impenetrable legalese that dominate such proceedings, a few enlightening gems have emerged from the mountain of paperwork released by the U.S Federal Trade Commission. How about the fact that Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea of deleting every Facebook user's friends list? Yes, really.

During a series of emails starting in 2022 and collated from court documents by TechCrunch, Zuckerberg discussed his fears concerning Facebook's declining relevance. "Even though the FB app’s engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly," Zuckerberg fretted.

His solution? Delete your friends list and introduce a new structure around following rather than friending. "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," he said.

"One potentially 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,” Zuckerberg went on.

So, after nuking your friends list, the next step would be to replace friending with following. "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," Zuckerberg mused.

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Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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