I Met Mark Zuckerberg Once

I met Mark Zuckerberg once.

It was a bright fall afternoon in sleepy Palo Alto. A friend and I were sitting outside Port of Peri Peri, catching up, when a couple of plainclothes security guards walked by. A few moments later, Mark strolled by, along with an older man and woman who looked to be his parents. The interaction was brief – as he approached, we looked at each other and I nodded, he said “Hi” and smiled. And off he went with his posse.

I now regret not having gotten up and asked him at least one of many pressing questions that keep me up at night. Zuckerberg singlehandedly controls the dominant means of communication globally, and as a result is one of the most powerful figures in the world. His platforms, brilliant in their conception or in how he ended up owning them, are more used than any other communication channel in the world. And his platforms are shaping the world around us into a dystopian future.

I should have asked him, what of the increasingly invasive privacy violations that Facebook is committing? What of the unchecked hate-mongering rampant on his empire’s apps? What of the bias in information censorship committed by Indian sweatshops on the other side of the world?

What of the utterly barbaric calls for violence by one particular religious group – calls for violence that no other group in the world dare utter, such is the barbarity of what is being said – while their victims and supporters are silenced by having their audience limited, or worse, outright banned?

The Facebook empire has now been laid bare – as have most institutions the world over – as a conniving cabal of crooks capitulating to the call of a crass capitalistic cult causing chaos while the commonfolk couldn’t care less.

Mind you, I have nothing against any religion – the friend I was catching up with at Port of Peri Peri belongs to the same religion that these barbaric hordes profess to follow, and is one of the finest gentlemen I befriended at Stanford.

However, this blatant censorship and bias on Facebook platforms has hit a nerve. I can no longer idly stand by while crimes of the highest order are being committed on my watch. And Gaza isn’t the only thing censored at this time. The deportation of Afghan refugees, including registered and legal ones, the war crimes committed on the Russia-Ukraine front, and the terrible conditions in Sudan are all glossed over.

What makes the entire experience even more nauseating is that the sheep are busy posting stories and statuses about dinner, drinks, and parties. They post a story about surfing on a beach, then 30 minutes later, a post on the massacre in Gaza, and then an hour later a story about dinner.

These are the people who most closely resemble the pigs in Animal Farm, busy wining and dining while everyone around them is slaughtered, happy just to have a seat at the table.

This entire experience has been so off-putting that I am divesting from the Meta Platforms network entirely. I have spent the last several hours scrubbing my profiles, and my scripts will have the job completed by tomorrow. Moving forward, my accounts and the networks they have will only be used to broadcast my thoughts one-way.

For all intents and purposes, I am leaving Facebook. It was a good 14-year run while it lasted, alas money has a tendency of ruining the best of things.

To paraphrase Jawwad Farid, “If you need to find me, you will figure out a way.”