Now that the Facebook Papers reveal what we’ve long suspected — Mark Zuckerberg is Satan — the roll-out of fuzzy, friendly, family-man Zuck began in earnest last weekend, with his reclusive wife, Priscilla Chan, granting a lengthy interview to The Sunday Times UK.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s Moral Compass,” ran the headline, Chan positioning herself as such. Facebook and Instagram may be problematic, she says, but her dead-eyed husband is just misunderstood.
Teenage girls beset by suicidal ideations, eating disorders, over-sexualized content, anxiety and depression after scrolling IG?
Mark, says Chan, is really a feminist, wouldn’t you know.
“He has always believed in me,” she says, “more than I have been able to believe in myself.”
She’s just a mom working in the charity space who loves to unwind with “The Great British Baking Show,” because “they’re so nice to each other. They’re all helping each other . . . That’s what I need. We need more of this in the world!”
Despite Facebook not doing any of that.
Chan is the daughter of Vietnam War refugees, parents who worked 18-hour days to give their daughter every opportunity America offers. Chan put herself through Harvard on scholarship (there’s a nice little detail about her work-study requiring her to feed the rich kids) and became a physician.
Yet she’s throwing herself across the train tracks here, another grim, cynical example of women softening up their scoundrels.
Instagram and Facebook pushing algorithms that make the user experience more toxic? Teenagers reporting they feel worse about themselves on Insta but unable to stop scrolling? Comparisons to the psychopathic predation of Big Tobacco on its consumers?
Despite Chan’s complicity in minimizing all of this, Congress is hearing it first hand from whistleblowers and defectors.“[We] took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset,” former Facebook director Tim Kendall testified last month. “At worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war.”
But no, no! says Chan. Look over here! Mark and I are giving away almost all of our money! I don’t wear make-up or jewelry or fancy clothes! We’re just a regular, all-American family that likes to play board games and teach our kids Mandarin and how to code and we are definitely, absolutely keeping our daughters off social media until they’re at least 13.
Has Chan mentioned the privilege of being Zuckerberg’s wife?
“I get to see how thoughtful Mark is,” she says.
What we’ve been learning ratifies all our worst suspicions about Mark Zuckerberg: He has been warned about these outcomes for vulnerable teenagers — to say nothing of the misinformation, politically divisive content, anti-vax crusading and other garbage teeming on his platforms — and doesn’t care.
Unless you’re a ruthless regime threatening to cut off Facebook’s online presence. Then Zuckerberg folds faster than a cheap tent.
“Every single time Facebook could improve,” said Kate Cox in Ars Technica, “it doubles down on causing more harm.”
CNN Health, May 2017: “Instagram is the worst social media app for young people’s health.”
Yet Mark Zuckerberg was developing a version of Instagram for children under 13 — Instagram Kids — despite a coalition of 35 international children’s and consumer groups begging him to abandon it.
Prominent Silicon Valley critic and NYU professor Scott Galloway was dead on when he called Zuckerberg “the most dangerous person in the world” back in 2019.“The notion that we are going to have one individual deciding the algorithms for an encrypted backbone of 2.7 billion users is frightening,” Galloway wrote. “This is absolutely bad for the planet, bad for society and it is clear where they are going. Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath and he has institutionalized sociopathy.”
Chan would like to sand down that image. Philanthropy, she tells the Sunday Times UK, “is where our heart is. And this is where Mark’s heart is.”
As for Facebook’s role in pumping harmful content and dangerous disinformation into the veins of its hopelessly addicted users, Chan has a solution to that.
“The main thing is talking to people about information that they encounter and really listening to them . . . if you write them off, it’s hard to get to the core of what makes them concerned.”
Oh, the irony.
Television shows like “The Sopranos” might be too bloodthirsty for Chan’s tastes, but she might heed one psychiatrist’s warning to Carmela Soprano, herself the dutiful wife of a most powerful man:
“I’m not charging you because I won’t take blood money, and neither can you. One thing you can never say? That you haven’t been told.”
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