Facebook’s strategy of cloning competitors might be inspired by Chinese tech companies, Zuckerberg emails show

Emails unveiled in an antitrust hearing suggest that Chinese tech companies like Renren and Tencent inspired Facebook to quickly copy competitors

Mark Zuckerberg once courted China but has toughened his rhetoric amid rising geopolitical tensions

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seen here testifying before the House Financial Services Committee in 2019, endorsed the idea of quickly copying competitors similar to Chinese tech companies. Photo: Reuters

Published: 8:11pm, 31 Jul 2020Updated: 8:11pm, 31 Jul 2020

It wasn’t long ago that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to be pulling out all the stops to try to gain access to China. But rising tensions between the US and China have shown that Zuckerberg no longer sees the country as a friend. Still, his time spent admiring China appears to have resulted in Facebook adopting a at least one important strategy from Chinese companies.

Email exchanges from 2012 presented by the House Judiciary Committee show that Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg agreed to a suggestion that the company quickly clone other products to “prevent our competitors from getting footholds.”

In one of the emails, a high-level Facebook employee makes a case for using China’s “strong culture for cloning things quickly and building lots of different products”. The unnamed employee adds that this “allows them to plant lots of seeds” that start out as inferior products but eventually close the gap with the originals.

The person uses China’s Renren as one example. Once called China’s Facebook, the then-popular social network eventually lost relevance as it failed to compete with Tencent’s WeChat in the mobile era.

But in 2012, Renren was still relevant and the Facebook employee met with the company’s founders. Renren didn’t just have its own version of Facebook, the employee explains in the email. The company also built its own versions of Pinterest and Tumblr and made its own voice-enabled messaging app. Renren made games, too, and it had six of the top 10 games on iOS at the time, the email notes.

The email also mentions a “Voxer-like” voice messaging app from Tencent that’s “really blowing up in China”, which is likely WeChat. The chat app was launched in 2011 and quickly took off the next year. Today it’s a do-it-all super app around which China’s netizens organise their digital lives.

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