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There's one thing Mark Zuckerberg can't copy

Mark Zuckerberg, wearing a navy blue suit and light blue silk tie, grins as he points to something off camera - Paul Marotta/Getty
Mark Zuckerberg, wearing a navy blue suit and light blue silk tie, grins as he points to something off camera - Paul Marotta/Getty

"Picasso had a saying," Steve Jobs once told a documentary crew. "He said 'good artists copy, great artists steal'." Though Picasso himself appears to have lifted the quote from TS Eliot, it was apt enough for Jobs, who said Apple had been "shameless" about stealing great ideas.

If the maxim is true, then Mark Zuckerberg is Michelangelo. Over the years, the Facebook chief executive has become famous for lifting features and formats from competitors, sometimes crushing them in the process.

"Do you copy your competitors?" he was asked while testifying before the US Congress last July. "We've certainly adapted features that others have led in..." he began, before being cut off as he tried to object that others had also copied Facebook.

The ruthless founder appeared to be anticipating similar criticisms on Monday when he explained Facebook's new audio features in an online Q&A with the newsletter Platformer. Users will now be able to listen to podcasts within Facebook, record and broadcast brief audio "Soundbites", and tune into live audio chatrooms.

The latter in particular looks like an attempt to ride the buzz around Clubhouse, an invite-only phone chat app that has captured the hearts of celebrities and the tech elite.

"You know, I think every once in a while a new medium comes along that can be adapted to a lot of different areas," said Zuckerberg. "Feeds were kind of like this initially. We built News Feed in 2006, [and] then since then almost every social product has some sort of feed.

"But a feed isn't one thing: it's a format that basically takes the shape and feel of the context that it's in. Your feed on Pinterest or LinkedIn is going to feel a lot different from your feed on Facebook, for example. We've seen that a bit with Stories, too, and that's certainly going to be true with these live rooms."

Zuckerberg did not need to remind his listeners of what happened with Stories. That was Facebook's term for vanishing messages that aped Snapchat's central feature, first on Instagram and later on Facebook Messenger.

Both features quickly tore ahead of Snapchat in popularity, helping to push their rival into its most troubled period. While it has now somewhat recovered, it still has far fewer users than Instagram or Messenger Stories, let alone the apps themselves.

The pattern had been echoed years earlier when Facebook adopted Twitter's news feed and hashtags. Even its "On This Day" feature reproduced a third-party Facebook add-on called Timehop. More recently, it has launched newsletter tools similar to those of Substack.

Zuckerberg has a point when he says audio chatrooms are simply a new "medium". Nobody owns the concept of a news feed, a text chatroom, a QWERTY keyboard or a mouse. It is unlikely that any copyright court would award Clubhouse or Snapchat any damages.

But that also means that small companies have little defence when Facebook begins to wield its size against them. With billions of users, it can promote its new features at the top of the world's most popular feeds, and keep pushing indefinitely until it finally gains traction.

That is why Democrats in Congress, as well as US competition regulators, see these actions as a potential abuse of market dominance. They have accused Facebook of adopting a "copy, acquire, kill" strategy towards smaller competitors – a case burnished by emails and message logs preceding the company's acquisition of Instagram.

Nevertheless, there is one thing that even Facebook may not be able to copy. Clubhouse and TikTok are not just bundles of new software features but cultures, with communities, scenes, even movements nurtured by their innovations into something that cannot be reproduced.

Look at Reels, Facebook's much-trumpeted TikTok clone. Though there is some evidence of increasing momentum, it is very far from rivaling TikTok's impact on the culture of Generation Z. As one journalist put it in November, many of its videos still feel "like Facebook paid people to make them".

If any defence exists against Facebook's larceny, it is that even the world's sixth most valuable company cannot simply spend a culture into being.

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