An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

On October 17, Zuckerberg appeared at Georgetown University’s campus in Washington, DC, to deliver his first major public address on Facebook’s responsibility as a platform for speech. He came to defend his new policy for political misinformation, responding with defiance to criticism from the Biden campaign and scores of lawmakers.

He began his speech with a lie.

Zuckerberg stood behind a wooden lectern before 740 students, faculty, and media in the ornate Gaston Hall, a storied venue where presidents, religious leaders, and English royalty had spoken. Century-old murals of Jesuit figures and mythical Greek heroes adorned the walls. Zuckerberg’s audience was quiet, and the mood was solemn. They applauded politely and stayed in their seats. It was nothing like when Sen. Bernie Sanders or President Obama spoke on campus. Then, students stood, and their cheers could be heard from outside the building.

Zuckerberg, with the sleeves of his black sweater pushed up on his forearms, began to read from the teleprompters. He offered a revisionist history of Facebook’s genesis. While he was at Harvard, he told the audience, the United States had just gone to war in Iraq: “The mood on our campus was disbelief,” he said, adding that he and other students were eager to hear more perspectives about the war. “Those early years shaped my belief that giving everyone a voice empowers the powerless and pushes society to be better over time.”

On Twitter, journalists and academics called out Zuckerberg for attempting to rewrite Facebook’s origin story. The platform was widely understood to have begun with a project to rate hot Harvard girls, not quite the serious-minded undertaking he was describing fifteen years later on the Georgetown stage. And while protests had broken out at Harvard and other schools across the United States after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Zuckerberg had not discussed, nor had he exhibited any interest in, the war, and his site was used for more mundane interests, friends recalled. “I was very surprised to hear that version,” Chris Hughes said. “People largely used [Thefacebook] to share movie and music recommendations—not to protest foreign wars.”

The story was a reminder of how much time had passed since the world was first introduced to Facebook. Once viewed as a hero hacker among college students, Zuckerberg now came off as a rich thirty-five-year-old father of two. The college students were almost a full generation younger than he. They weren’t using Facebook, a site popular with older audiences. Many were on Instagram but were increasingly spending time on Snapchat and TikTok.

Georgetown was a deliberate choice. Facebook’s policy and lobbying staff wanted to find a place for Zuckerberg to deliver his speech where his words would carry intellectual and historical import. The staff wanted to do it in Washington, with Zuckerberg’s most important viewers a few miles east, at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Facebook staff treated it like a major political event, sending an advance team to sweep the hall and plan out the choreography for Zuckerberg’s entrance. Next to the wooden lectern at the center of the stage, they arranged for teleprompters. And the Facebook CEO had worked on the speech for weeks.

Zuckerberg then described the importance of free speech in the civil rights movement. With every social movement comes a clampdown on free expression. He evoked the Black Lives Matter movement, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., who was jailed for protesting peacefully. “In times of social tension, our impulse is often to pull back on free expression. Because we want the progress that comes from free expression, but we don’t want the tension,” he said.