Why Facebook Mulled Wiping Friends Lists

Trials are great for airing technology executives’ private ruminations, including some of their most out-there strategies. Among the most extraordinary that have so far come to light in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “potentially crazy idea” in 2022 for refreshing Facebook: erasing friend lists on the app—as frequently as every year—and having users start from scratch.

That nuclear option could help users connect with people they cared about at that moment, Zuckerberg wrote in 2022 emails. Facebook has struggled with users sharing less content with their friends over time, in part because those friends include people they knew from years prior, Zuckerberg said in his testimony last week. But erasing friend lists could also anger a lot of users! After all, where else can you keep track of your high school classmates or relatives that you see every few years?