Facebook's Promise of Community Is a Lie

Like Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Mark Zuckerberg has learned to have regrets. Until very recently, the Facebook CEO wouldn't have seen himself as a villain in a horror novel but rather the hero of a happier genre, a classic American rags-to-riches story in the tradition of Horatio Alger. From his dorm room in Harvard in 2004, Zuckerberg created the outstanding economic success story of our century—a social media giant that now has more than two billion active users and a capitalization of $445 billion. Even if you don't like the site, it's hard not to be awed by the scale of its reach, which is almost without parallel in human history. As Max Read notes in a recent survey of the internet leviathan in New York magazine, Facebook users represent “the single largest non-biologically sorted group of people on the planet after ‘Christians'—and, growing consistently at around 17 percent year after year, it could surpass that group before the end of 2017 and encompass one-third of the world's population by this time next year.”