Mark Zuckerberg still thinks we’re all “dumb fucks.”
This indisputable fact was once again ground into our skulls Thursday morning when the CEO of the toxic cesspool otherwise known as Facebook waxed semi-philosophic on free speech at Georgetown University. Amidst the tired and expected Reddit-logic-bro-like ramblings, one moment stood out for its sheer audacity: Zuckerberg’s attempt to forcefully rewrite the history of his company’s founding.
And he’s clearly counting on us buying the lie.
Facebook, Zuckerberg insisted, was born out of the noblest of impulses to give “everyone a voice” in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yes, you read that correctly.
Before we get into just how extremely bullshit we know this claim to be, it’s worth reading it in its stupefying entirety.
When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. It felt like we were acting without hearing a lot of important perspectives. The toll on soldiers, families and our national psyche was severe, and most of us felt powerless to stop it. I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently. Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.
Back then, I was building an early version of Facebook for my community, and I got to see my beliefs play out at smaller scale.
Got that? Zuckerberg is implying Facebook was a manifestation of his belief that giving people a voice would make the world a better place. Except we know that isn’t true.
Like, not even remotely.
Facebook’s origin story is an incredibly well documented — if messy — one, and, unfortunately for the CEO, it paints him in a rather unflattering light.
For those blissfully unaware, the development of TheFacebook followed on Zuckerberg’s creation of a “Hot or Not” clone called Facemash, which scraped Harvard students’ photos from an online directory and then asked students to rank the respective hotness of those pictured.
Contemporaneous reporting by Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, laid it all out in clear detail.
“The site was created entirely by Zuckerberg over the last week in October, after a friend gave him the idea,” reads the 2003 article. “The website used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person.”
Now, Zuckerberg has repeatedly insisted that Facemash was totally separate from Facebook.
“The claim that Facemash was somehow connected to the development of Facebook… it isn’t, it wasn’t,” he told Congress in 2018.
If we are to believe that claim, which is itself dubious, then we are still left with scores of records showing that Zuckerberg made Facebook with dating services in mind.
“Like,” Business Insider reports Zuckerberg as writing to his friend Adam D’Angelo just before the launch of TheFacebook.com, “I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating.”
Of his notorious decision to delay working on a competitor’s social network dubbed Harvard Connection so that he could get TheFacebook up in time?
“I’m going to fuck them,” Business Insider reports him as telling a friend.
Even Zuckerberg himself has, in the past, provided a sanitized retelling of his justification for launching Facebook that had nothing to do with the lofty claims he made today.
“Ten years ago,” CNBC reports him as telling Freakonomics Radio in 2018, “you know, I was just trying to help connect people at colleges and a few schools.”
Now, there is itself nothing wrong with launching a dating or social website. However, when that site morphs into the democracy-eating beast that is the present-day Facebook, understanding how and why that transition happened is of some pretty serious import.
Self mythologizing your company’s origin story to make yourself into a T-shirt-sporting statesman, and assuming we’re all dumb enough to lap up those lies reflects an ongoing desire on the part of Zuckerberg to bend reality to his will.
For a man with such unparalleled power over both our elections and personal information, that should bother all of us. Unless, of course, us “fucks” are too dumb to notice.