Facebook was literally founded on stealing private images to abuse women, using a popularity pageant as pretext for public shaming.

Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy… Zuckerberg said that he was aware of the shortcomings of his site, and that he had not intended it to be seen by such a large number of students.

Yeah, ok Mark.

The bank robber didn’t expect the bank to see him rob it? Did he think he was Big Brother? All seeing, but never seen…

He setup a public website to watch and control women. We’re supposed to believe it wasn’t intended to be accountable from “such a large number of students” (meaning he thought his victims shouldn’t have a say in his abuse of them), as if that’s even a reasonable excuse?

When women of color at Harvard called out this privileged criminal’s dishonest disinformation tactics, Zuckerberg faced absolutely no consequences and instead grabbed himself a girl to ride off into Silicon Valley like a bro celebrity with millions of dollars in his pockets somehow.

But my best memory from Harvard was… I had just launched this prank website Facemash, and the ad board wanted to “see me”. Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out. My parents came to help me pack. My friends threw me a going away party… in what must be one of the all time romantic lines, I said [to a girl at the party]: “I’m going to get kicked out in three days, so we need to go on a date quickly.” Actually, any of you graduating can use that line. I didn’t end up getting kicked out — I did that to myself. …you could say [Facemash] was the most important thing I built in my time here.

Framing serious ethics violations as pranks while converting harm into personal gain didn’t just continue, it was rewarded by Harvard. The institution itself became an early investor into his bigger platform concept of capture and extraction of value from targets (especially women), setting a pattern that continues today.

Twenty years later, it seems things maybe are getting even worse, thanks to people like Joe Rogan. In his recent interview, Zuckerberg deployed a classic tactic of information warfare: reframing accountability for attacks as being persecuted.

“It really is a slippery slope,” Zuckerberg told Rogan, while expressing worry about “becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world.”

By claiming Meta’s fact-checking was “something out of 1984” while invoking a “slippery slope” fallacy, he attempts to recast being in absolute control over his content moderation system as also being a victim of oppression by basic societal ethics (known since the 1700s as a system of inherited rights — law and order — that prevents tyrannical abuses).

His intentional self-contradiction is glaring. Every algorithm tweak and content policy is Zuckerberg actively deciding truth on his platform as evidenced by his own admission that he unilaterally was always “deciding truth” and overseeing all fact-checking.

Relationships were so frayed [by refusing to admit I was wrong] that within a year or so every single person on the management team was gone.

Zuckerberg’s rhetorical duplicity and sleight-of-hand becomes particularly stark alongside his dismantling of diversity programs and relaxation of hate speech policies. When faced with responsibility for egregious harm, Zuckerberg’s defense is as absurd as an industrial-era factory owner claiming coal restrictions would be on a slippery slope to “dangerously clean air” – it’s simply a privileged attempt to avoid accountability through childish fallacies for narrative control.

He may as well have said he was in danger of being run over by a unicorn that morning. There’s never a unicorn, there’s never a slippery slope – there’s only Zuckerberg intentionally facilitating widespread abuse of people with a big wink and a nod from someone who also rose to prominence promoting violence for profit.

The parallel is telling: Rogan got rich promoting consensual fights while Zuckerberg got rich exploiting non-consensual ones. Is it any wonder Rogan rolled over like a lapdog when Zuckerberg claimed he should face no external restrictions of any kind when aiming to profit from external harms?