In 2022, as Facebook’s (META) popularity dwindled, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposed a “potentially crazy idea” to increase the social media platform’s cultural relevance: purging users’ friend networks and making people start all over again on the platform.

This came to light after Zuckerberg took the witness stand Monday amid a landmark antitrust trial against the company, where various emails have been introduced as evidence, including the one where he proposed his “crazy” idea in an internal email to Meta’s top brass.

Zuckerberg was brainstorming ways to reinvigorate Facebook’s user engagement using social graphs (friend networks) and wrote in an email: “Option 1. Double down on Friending. One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again.”

The proposal was met with skepticism and hesitancy from at least one person inside the company. Tom Alison, who was the head of Facebook at the time, warned Zuckerberg that such a move could disrupt key features of the platform, particularly on Instagram, which is also under Meta’s umbrella.

Alison wrote back to Zuckerberg, “I’m not sure Option #1 in your proposal (Double-down on Friending) would be viable given my understanding of how vital the friend use case is to IG.”

Zuckerberg responded that he didn’t follow Alison’s concerns and raised another thought: “Do you have a sense of how much work it would be to convert profiles to a follow model?”

On the stand Monday, Zuckerberg said Facebook never followed through with his proposal.

During his hours of testimony in a Washington, D.C. federal courtroom, Zuckerberg said the social media platform’s primary purpose these days isn’t to connect with friends anymore — Facebook’s feed “has turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space,” he said.

“The friend part has gone down quite a bit,” Zuckerberg testified.

However, in late March, Facebook announced the creation of a “friends tab,” a separate news feed for app users that would show posts shared exclusively by people’s friends and family. In a press release, the company said it was “bringing the magic of friends back to Facebook.”

Alison, who is still the head of Facebook, said to The New York Times, “This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media. … We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”