An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

I gave your app a lot of myself, and you've become one of the world's most powerful men thanks to people like me… and you failed me.

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

You don't know me and you'll never read this. I'm nobody special, not an expert… just one of the millions of people who used Facebook for a long time.

There was a time when I thought of you as a hero.

I opened a Facebook account at 18 years old, and was a DEDICATED user for 12 years. It’s hard to explain to younger people now, but Facebook genuinely used to be awesome; my friends and I shared things back and forth constantly, and the algorithm had a good balance between new stuff and your friends’ content. We spent hours on it everyday, the way TikTok exists for young people now.

I thought of you as a hero because I followed you on Facebook, on and off over the years. It made me so happy that this app I loved was led by someone around my own age, who spoke out for those in need and seemed to be ready to help the world outside him. At a time when millennials were being pegged as lazy avocado toast fanatics, we could point to you (and a few others) and say “mmmkay, but we’re making a better world.”

Whether it was naivete, good faith, or just a failure of imagination, it never occurred to me that my data would be in jeopardy with you at the helm. There were hacks, sure, and nobody's profile could be completely safe, but it never occurred to me to worry about Facebook itself. The idea was preposterous.

You made a place for us on the internet to share our lives. We announced births and birthdays. I learned of friends’ suicides and car accidents. We cheered each other on through cancer, organized charity drives and announced our relationships with your app. We had hard conversations, spicy conversations, PERSONAL conversations. I flirted with men, argued with my grandma, and met a distant relative from Germany.

And you sold us.

It's one thing to advertise, Mark; you sold our inner thoughts. Our opinions. Our triumphs and downfalls, worries and weaknesses. Every like, comment, friends list, click, hover, view and preference, you sold it. And we were manipulated over and over.

The only reason Facebook still has users is because the extent of the invasion is literally hard to imagine or explain. I’m no expert; it has taken a couple documentaries, news stories and a lot of long term thinking to mostly grasp what you've done. It's been years since I used Facebook the way I used to, because there came a point where it felt like surveillance.

You’ve likely heard the rumors swirling around these last few days that you bought TikTok; I don't know if that's true. All I can tell you is that these last couple days, since the weird ass not-a-ban, that familiar surveillance feeling seems to have infected my For You feed.

You have proven over and over and over again; our data is not safe with you. I'm only logging back into my Facebook and IG to delete them. I had WhatsApp for like 5 minutes, you can keep that account. Threads too.

But for the rest of my natural life, I'm going to avoid any project close to Meta. Rest assured, my dollars will be directed away from all the humans who stand on top of humanity (as far as possible, anyway), so I don't mean to single you out. It's just that you, Mark… I gave your app a lot of myself, and you've become one of the world's most powerful men thanks to people like me… and you failed me.

You were raised Jewish. Then, as the folklore goes, you were atheist for a long time. It's caused me to wonder, what do you think of your new billionaire bestie giving a supposed Roman Salute on live television? Are you proud to have donated to the same cause he did?

It's funny, you billionaires are so gung-ho and dead-set on saving the world and improving humanity… as long as we'll pay any price and do it your way. All you'd have to do to permanently change the course of the country is give your fucking money away. Give all of it away, right now, yesterday, and then say loudly in front of a bunch of reporters “Nobody needs $211 billion, you should tax people like me at 99%.” That is the conversation we need, worldwide.

But none of you actually want to save the world, you just want to own it.

Good luck with your Metaverse bro, but we're literally trying to keep ourselves fed out here.