⁍ Zuckerberg stumbled at a congressional hearing on alleged abuse of market power on Wednesday.

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⁍ Lawmakers confronted the social media titan with damaging internal emails about the company’s acquisitions.

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⁍ The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel appeared to draw on a rich trove of Facebook company emails.

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– The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel appeared to draw on a rich trove of Facebook company emails, releasing numerous screenshots of correspondence from Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives. Using the exchanges, lawmakers got Zuckerberg to acknowledge that he saw photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp as competitors when Facebook acquired them. “The businesses are nascent but … if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us,’ Zuckerberg wrote in 2012, two months before the Instagram purchase. In another email, written the same day Facebook announced the acquisition, Zuckerberg conceded that “Instagram was our threat,” adding: “one thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.” Zuckerberg also acknowledged that Facebook considered Instagram and WhatsApp competitors when acquiring them, Reuters reports. “One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them,” he wrote. The committee presented fewer such exchanges to the other executives testifying at the hearing, which also featured Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet Inc-owned Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple Inc’s Tim Cook. Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal used an email to question Zuckerberg on whether Facebook copied competitors like Snapchat for anti-competitive reasons. “How many competitors did Facebook end up copying?” she asked. “I don’t know,” Zuckerberg answered, stammering. She asked if Facebook had ever threatened to clone a competitor’s feature while negotiating to buy them. “I would like to remind you that you are under oath and there are quotes from Facebook’s own documents,” she told him.