Mark Zuckerberg downloaded and used a photo app that Facebook later cloned and crushed amid claims arising from an antitrust lawsuit

• The founders of Phhhoto have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

• The lawsuit accuses Facebook of cloning and then destroying the application.

• “It attracted Phhhoto” with the promise of a partnership that never materialized, the lawsuit claims.

The founders of a photography app startup have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, The New York Times first reported on Thursday.

In 2014, Champ Bennett, Omar Elsayed and Russell Armand founded Phhhoto, a company that allowed users to take and post short bursts of photos that looped like a GIF.

Phhhoto’s founders said in the lawsuit, reviewed by Insider, that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was an early user of their app, having downloaded and published it in August 2014. The lawsuit said other Facebook executives also downloaded the app.

Facebook and Instagram then “implemented a plan to crush Phhhoto and put it out of business,” in part by creating a “slave clone” of the Phhhoto app, the lawsuit said.

Meta did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. Meta spokesman Joe Osborne told The Times: “This lawsuit is without merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves.”

The lawsuit states that Bryan Hurren, Facebook’s manager of strategic partnerships, contacted Phhhoto in February 2015 about a potential partnership that would enable Phhhoto to integrate with Facebook Messenger. Hurren wrote in an email that Phhhoto is “truly amazing,” the suit wrote.

Phhhoto refused, but Facebook offered to integrate the app with its news feed, which the startup saw as a significant opportunity since it had previously only been integrated with its Instagram feed, the lawsuit said.

Phhhoto’s founders said in the lawsuit that Facebook “hazed Phhhoto for months without making significant progress on its purported integration.”

As Phhhoto did the technical work to prepare for the integration, Hurren told one of the founders that Facebook had “hanged up on some legal discussions,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit states that in March 2015, Instagram unexpectedly cut off Phhhoto from its “Find Friends” feature. In a phone conversation with one of the founders, “Hurren explained that Instagram was apparently upset that Phhhoto was gaining more and more users because of its relationship with Instagram,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also states that in October 2015, hours before Phhhoto announced its launch on Android, Instagram announced its own photo looping feature, Boomerang.

The lawsuit says Phhooto closed in June 2017.

“The actions of Facebook and Instagram destroyed Phhhoto as a viable business and ruined the company’s investment prospects,” the lawsuit said.

Facebook has faced intense scrutiny from lawmakers over its approach to competition with smaller rivals. Emails released in 2020 as a result of a congressional investigation show that in the months before Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012, Zuckerberg said that Instagram “could significantly harm us without becoming a great company.”

In December 2020, Facebook was hit with two antitrust lawsuits filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general, both of whom accused the company of harming competition by buying up or suppressing smaller competitors. In June, a federal judge dismissed the FTC’s case, saying it failed to establish Facebook’s monopoly.

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