MOCKING FACEBOOK’S EARLY USERSIn one of the earliest stories of Facebook’s founding, a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg mocked the roughly 4,000 students who’d joined his nascent service, bragging to friends in text messages about the vast amount of personal information he’d collected thanks to the misplaced trust of his users. Zuckerberg called them “dumb” and punctuated the word with profanity. When Silicon Alley Insider, a predecessor to Business Insider, published those messages in 2010, Zuckerberg apologized during an interview for a New Yorker article, saying he “absolutely” regretted those remarks.BURYING A FEDERAL SETTLEMENTOn Nov. 9, 2011, the Federal Trade Commission subjected Facebook to stricter privacy oversight after finding that the company arbitrarily made private information public without notice, failed to limit data sharing with apps when users activated restrictive settings, shared personal information with advertisers after saying it wouldn’t, and more.The same day, Zuckerberg posted a 1,418 word essay grandly titled “ Our Commitment to the Facebook Community ” that didn’t mention the FTC action until a third of the way in and described blunders like Beacon as “a bunch of mistakes.”VR TOUR OF A DISASTER ZONEZuckerberg’s fascination with virtual reality long predated his decision to rename the company Facebook as Meta Platforms. On Oct. 9, 2017, he and a Facebook employee starred in a live VR tour of Puerto Rico in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The pair beamed themselves into prerecorded 3-D footage of the damage and recovery efforts; Zuckerberg described the you-are-there feeling as “one of the really magical things about virtual reality,” especially given, as he said, that “it’s a really tough place to get to now.”He later expounded on Facebook’s own recovery efforts, but the dissonant video drew so many complaints that Zuckerberg posted a brief apology in the video chat, explaining that his attempt to showcase Facebook’s efforts at disaster recovery weren’t very clear and apologizing to anyone who was offended.
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