Full of It: How Mark Zuckerberg Altered Facebook's Origin to Soothe His Own Ego

On October 17th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the origins of his website with a captive audience at Georgetown University. In his explanation, Zuckerberg said:

"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. When students got to express who they were and what mattered to them, they organized more social events, started more businesses, and even challenged some established ways of doing things on campus. It taught me that while the world's attention focuses on major events and institutions, the bigger story is that most progress in our lives comes from regular people having more of a voice."

As someone who was among The Facebook's earliest users, I can share my reaction to this statement with one simple word:

Bullshit.

It's almost as if Zuckerberg forgot that there was an entire film dedicated to the origin of Facebook and that not a single time in the film is it mentioned that the benevolent reason for the site was to empower society's most voiceless individuals. As The Social Network portrays, Zuckerberg's baby was his way to exploit women and to capitalize on the exclusivity of prominent colleges and universities like Harvard. The goal was never to encourage political discourse but rather to open up internal, school-based databases to wider audiences. College students at the time may have had some passionate feelings about the Iraq War but those feelings were an obvious second to looking up the hot girl in your astronomy class and seeing whether or not she had a boyfriend.

And this was exactly how many of us did, in fact, use TheFacebook in those early years. When it came to early campuses in the fall of 2004, the site was extremely limited. You had your profile with your picture and basic information. You had a status update where you filled in the sentence that began with your name with the word is and then you completed the sentence. After a year, pictures were added in a very rudimentary form. But even as the site was evolving, one thing remained constant: the access to those within your own network. On the surface, it appeared as if you could only access someone's personal information if you "friended" them and they accepted your friendship request. But TheFacebook conveniently had a backdoor for that. In the early years, there was a feature that allowed you to "poke" someone. Initially, none of us knew what this did but it was later revealed that the poke feature allowed you to access a profile of a friend or a friend of a friend even if that person didn't know you. In short, it was a creepy way to stalk someone you might be interested in to gain access to their personal information for three days without them even knowing who you were.

But even if millennials were misusing Zuckerberg's site to stalk and flirt rather than discuss American foreign policy, the fact of the matter is Zuckerberg's entire business model undercuts his argument. Zuckerberg specifically targeted Ivy League colleges first because he knew them to be the most exclusive. If he truly wanted to open up discussion on the Iraq War for creating a "voice that empowers the powerless" then Zuckerberg would have ditched the haughty Ivies and instead focused on community colleges and state universities in the most depressed regions of the United States. But of course, he didn't do this. Instead, Zuckerberg focused on those exclusive institutions and if they were initially hesitant to TheFacebook then he would pepper surrounding schools until those institutions gave in. There was zero concerted effort to ensure that his new website was being accessed by any of the economically disadvantaged in this country.

The truth is that Facebook was founded as a dating site. In fact, that is what Mark Zuckerberg has previously admitted. In November of 2004, the site had zero impact on the Iraq War and when challenger John Kerry challenged incumbent president, George W. Bush, there was zero political discussion on the site other than a few disgruntled status messages from John Kerry supporters. As opposition to the Iraq War grew, Facebook focused more on user features rather than political influence. In September of 2006 when support for the Iraq War was at an all-time low, Facebook was expanding the site to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address. For Mark Zuckerberg to claim that he was giving a voice to the powerless by opening up his social media site to middle schoolers is laughable at best and intentionally disingenuous at worst.

Yet, this is exactly what Zuckerberg is trying to do last week: rewrite his own history. After being caught canoodling Republican big wigs earlier in the week, he felt compelled to portray himself as a paragon of virtue and he decided he'd do that by reimagining Facebook's own origin story. Fortunately, there are enough of us out there who used the site early on and who saw it for what it was: a way to connect with those who weren't already in our social network. Even the most radical campus organizer wasn't using Facebook in its early years to rally opposition to the Iraq War and to pretend that he or she was is an obvious lie. Facebook was founded on elitism and not once during its expansion was there a premium placed on marginalized communities. After all, you needed a verified school email address to join the site, meaning that the overwhelming majority of users were White and part of the upper-middle class. Those users, who tend to skew Republican, were exactly the kind of people that Zuckerberg wanted for his pet project and they were exactly the kind of people he wanted to help out by giving them unfettered access to their school's student database so that they could pursue the women of their dreams without them knowing. This, this exploitation of women for rich, White college students is what the true founding of Facebook was all about.

And this explanation is not something that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to be openly sharing with the students of Georgetown University.