Does Mark Zuckerberg Think I’m a Dumbf*uck?
Maybe.
Because only a Dumbf*uck gets their asterisk all fcuked up in Dumb*uck right?
Or maybe not.
Maybe someone leaked some bogus IMs to the Business Insider who published them because they were just too rich not to publish them. And leaked them just at the moment that Facebook was vulnerable to privacy issues to get people even more rilled up.
But, whatever.
Lots of other people are reporting on a supposed IM exchange that Zuckerberg had with a “friend” (was it a chick?) back when he was 19. Some “friend” huh?
The reported IM conversation goes something like this:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb f*ucks.
Leo says he’s shutting down his Facebook account. That came out earlier today though and was more in response to something that Jason Calacanis wrote I think.
Scoble offers the Zuckster some friendly advice.
I still think photos look like crap on Facebook. On that Flickrtab thing that I set up over there it seems like it stopped showing thumbnails entirely on my wall today. Anybody got any nails that they can loan me for a few weeks to finish building my barn please?
So here’s the thing with this Dumbfc*uck*k Fackebookery thing. It doesn’t matter *what* business you are in. You just can not refer to your customers as Dumpfucks. It just does not fly. People get insulted. It sounds condescending.
Now Facebookery can do one of two things. They can address this or they can ignore.
By ignoring it they are saying that transparency doesn’t matter and that they think very little of their users. And maybe they have enough addicts to get by with this. But that sucks.
Or they can address it. They can either deny it if the IMs are bogus. Or if they are in fact legit, they can get the PR team working overtime on sending out a message that it was a youthful indiscretion by a 19 year old kid who deeply regrets sending those IMs and who has done a lot of growing up in the past 8 years or whatever it is since he supposedly sent them. Maybe even put out a photo of the chick he was IMing with at the time if they think that might help.
Personally I think they should address it. Otherwise people might stop working on all their farms maybe.
Oh, and you can find my dumbass on Facebook here. Add me and I’ll add you back. Especially if you have a dumbf*cker camera over your face in your avatar like I do.
Update: Facebook has apparently now responded to this story. Good thing. Unfortunately the gist of their response is that they won’t address the IMs.
“We’re not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterize Mark’s and Facebook’s views towards privacy.”
Which sounds to me a lot like “yeah, Mark said those things, so unfortunately we can’t really come out and deny it as much as we wish we could,” — which is kind of chickens*hit if you ask me. Either say he said it or he didn’t say it. Trying to discredit the source as “anonymous” while saying your unwilling to address the conversation only makes Facebookery look worse.
Their entire response here:
“The privacy and security of our users’ information is of paramount importance to us. We’re not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterize Mark’s and Facebook’s views towards privacy.
Everyone within the company understands our success is inextricably linked with people’s trust in the company and the service we provide. We are grateful people continue to place their trust in us. We strive to earn that trust by trying to be open and direct about the evolution of the service and sharing information on how the 400 million people on the service can use the available settings to control where their information appears.”
added you
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FB addressed it in a response to the article: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-comments-on-zuckerbergs-damning-ims-2010-5
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Thanks Brenda, updated the post to reflect the response from the good folks at Facebook.
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Loved the post Thomas….and will most definitely add you!
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Fabulous Post!
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AWESOME! I just picked up 10 new friends on facebookery from this post! My farm is going to be so badass when I'm done with it.
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@Thomas Hawk You really should have put asterisks over those nipples.
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@@ trench, I thought it was an appropriate graphic, given that the post was about Facebook and all. Breastfeeding is not a crime. You're right though. An asterisk over the nipple would have been perfect.
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Wow, Zuckerberg is such a punk. I guess I was too when I was in College (graduated '96). I think we all forget that Facebook was started by a bunch of drunk college buddies.
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Did you see this? http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-convert-email-addresses-into-name-age
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@Thomas Hawk Don't forget, you always have this option available too:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_infamous_trench/3666043549/
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yikes!
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I really like the cheery cheeky truthiness in Thomas' post here. Great stuff. Thank you!
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Great post, Thomas! 1000 Internetz for you!
Yep. They can't deny it, because it's true. But see, the truth of that is it make me trust Facebook so much less. I have to ask myself, how much of that kind of ideal pervades the company. There have been some stories….
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I wouldn't take Silicon Alley Insider's bait. They're pretty much trash. But Facebook hasn't risen to the occasion to refute the wave of criticism they have received.
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Great post Thomas.
I'm just tired of Suckerberg & fakebook and their complete callousness when it comes to our privacy. The scary thing is that as much as I've been harping about this to my friends on FB, not a whole lot of them give a damn.
I can't wait for one of the alternatives like http://pip.io or http://joindiaspora.com/ to gather critical mass, and I'll be out the door in a hurry.
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I don't get what the problem is. It makes no difference if Zuck actually typed that shit in an IM 6 years ago or 6 hours ago. Anyone who gives facebook, or any other social networking site, all their personal data is, by definition, a Dumb f*uck.
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@Louis Gray, yeah, could just be SAI bait… but… FB did actually respond. And if they could have I'm sure they would have called BS on their story. But instead they criticized the source (as anonymous) and the incident (years ago) rather than simply denying it. This makes me think that there is some truth there. To try and dismiss it is a mistake in my opinion. If it's really BS then call it out as that. And if not, acknowledge it quickly, apologize and try to get people to move on. Who knows or maybe not.
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I've got a few extra chickens by the way, if anyone needs them for their farm.
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I'm basically with Thomas on this (and was similarly when related stories of Zuck's "youthful indiscretions" with Facebook data, and competitors' ideas came out – the response from FB was almost identical IIRC)
When I am not guilty, I flatly say so I don't worry so much about acknowledging the accusations, nor do I worry about giving them credence.
when I'm guilty and will suffer little to none upon admission of the guilt, I readily admit it.
When I am guilty, but cannot or must not admit that guilt, typically I say either that the accusation has no merit, or that the accusation is made irrelevant by past or current circumstances.This is the tack that Facebook has taken. Not surprisingly, they're not coming out with anything remotely resembling a strong argument for the "made irrelevant" nor the "no merit argument.
Certainly, in western society, we've generally agreed that your silence implies your consent. And while I will not convict you in court and sentence you that doesn't mean I don't believe your accusers.
It might be bait…but seriously…even if this is a straight up fabrication, how many of you actually doubt that there is roughly this conversation in Zucks IM history? A couple of y'all should know him? And…even if you don't…if you met him on the street, or in your dorm room….would you trust him (not would you want to be his friend, but would you trust him. It may not be a bad thing to not be trust_ed_ in business. As long as you're trust_worthy_ And to that I certainly cannot speak about Zuckerberg. I don't know him. I cannot judge the book by it's cover. But I can make some discernments based on my past experiences with books.
And I LOVE chickens, Thomas. I'll take all you've got. My duck-billed platypuses are about to breed. you should scoop up one of the babies from my newsfeed.
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Is this painting a Cranach ?
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Hans, this painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. I shot it there when I visited Chicago last year. I spent two days shooting 100% of the paintings in the museum's permanent collection.
The painting was attributed to "Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden." Whatever that means.
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I've been spending the morning manually deleting everything in my account and it's maddening. It seems like they make the process very, very difficult. And of course, "Delete" does not really mean Delete.
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I'm glad someone as well-read here as you drew attention to the dumbf**k business, Thomas. I saw it yesterday and was going to let it go, partly because of my dislike of SAI. But it popped into my head this morning, saying, "hey, this warrants people's consideration." I think it does say something very unflattering about the kind of person Zuck is.
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I don't think this exchange means anything. In the context of a private conversation, people joke around and say all kinds of things. If you overheard a random snippet of my conversation with friends, you might draw all sorts of false conclusions about what kind of person I am, and all would be equally uninformed.
This whole thing is slightly negative PR, but completely free of substance.
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@Steven Rose Generally agree. Not in this case. I think if you give birth to something and put it out there all dressed up in "I've created this to help make your life easier and better" clothing and then privately refer to the people who bite as "dumbf**ks," chances are pretty good you're a ruthless SOB.
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@Kathi – Eh, I'm finding it hard to care about this. Who knows the context of the conversation? People of his (and even my) generation appreciate irony, and many of the things I say in informal conversation are not meant to be literally taken.
The issue here is not what he said (or texted, as it were). The issue is what he really thinks. Anyone that's upset about this would have to believe that he really believes in his heart of hearts that, at the time, he regarded FB users as dolts for sharing their info. Clearly, it's more reasonable to consider the amount of time and energy he put into building the site as a more significant demonstration of his beliefs than some tossed-off comment in a private conversation he never expected people to see when he was writing it.
Of course, this only matters if the goal of this conversation is getting to the bottom of what he really thinks. If the goal of this exchange on your side is to spread ill will about Facebook because you have an ax to grind (maybe you don't agree with their current stance on privacy or you have some particular reason to hate on Zuck, I don't know), then ok, that's fine. I'm not quite sure I like the things Zuck has said about privacy and the moves FB has made either…but I'd rather argue those points on their merits rather than assassinate someone's character as a more expedient way of accomplishing the same.
It seems the context of this exchange was Zuck trying to look cool by being flippant in an IM message to a hot girl when he was 19. I don't think it's reasonable to presume he was expecting it to be taken seriously by the recipient.
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With a business interest as pervasive and powerful as Facebook, and one still privately held last I heard, the character of its chief executive is fair game as a relevant, legitimate concern, IMO. That said, I acknowledge some bias at this point. I do not now have nor have I ever had a FB account because everything about it has irritated me from day one.
More recently, I find Zuckerberg himself irritating. (Edit: Not his personality, for which I have little feel, but his privacy-is-dead mantra, which strikes me as smug. Whenever I read about him saying those things I itch for an edit mode so I can insert "neener, neener" at the end of the quote.) So I am predisposed to see his antics in a pretty ugly light. On top of that I'm an insufferably serious old fart who doesn't care much for "flippancy" in any context. Maybe "ruthless SOB" will turn out to have been overstatement on my part. I hope so, for the sake of the millions of people and countless businesses that are subject to Zuck's whims at this point.
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@Kathi – Fair enough–more than a couple of my friends have resisted the siren call of Facebook for exactly the same reason, and if it weren't for a careful calculation on my part that the benefit outweighs the risks I wouldn't be on it either. (Partially, in my case, the reason the benefits outweigh the risks is because I'm so engaged with the web in general that my existence is public with or without it. And then I persist in making things worse by posting what I think about stuff on Google Buzz.
)
I think many of Zuck's statements on privacy are wishful thinking on his part, an attitude that's struggling to reconcile what makes sense for his business and what truly makes sense for his users and the web. I think an executive with more experience would have been more suspicious of a POV that neatly solves both problems at once, and that projecting a confident message ("privacy is dead") is not the same thing as having a message worth being confident about.
But this is why we like Silicon Valley. Boundless energy and youthful optimism standing in for safe & stodgy (yet valuable) experience. We expect our CEOs to make ridiculous statements and their companies to do ridiculous things, so long as in the final calculus those things are ridiculously awesome as often as they're simply, well…ridiculous.
To Zuck's credit, I think much of the things he's forced to take a public position on are simply not well understood by anyone yet. I mean, let's presume that someday everyone has contact lenses that wirelessly transmit high-def video to your personal cloud server. You'll never lose your car keys again since image recognition is so awesome it can tell you where you last left them! On the other hand, what does it mean for the locker room at the gym?
To an extent with things like Facebook, we're already being asked to make a binary choice between completely private and completely public when we're used to having a spectrum in the middle. (I'm struggling to say something clever here about "binary" being "digital and new" and "spectrum" being "analog and old-timey"…hm, I got nothing.) The answer, I think, is not to stem the flow of technology–that would be quite impossible. But that also means it's here, and it's continuing to come, and it's accelerating faster than we know what to do about it.
Though we're not comfortable with it now in the context of today, I can see the slight possibility of a future where we've learned to accept that if you change in the locker room in front of one person, you're changing in front of everyone. Not too many years ago the notion of celebrity sex tapes and flashing the paparazzi when exiting a limo would have been downright scandalous, but now most people's attitude is, wow, celebrities have naughty bits. woop de doo. Did I recoil at Zuck's "privacy is dead" comment because it's an uncomfortable truth or because it's arrogant and smug? To be honest, I don't like the sentiment, but I really can't say at this moment if I agree with it or not (and if not now, is it just a matter of time?).
It's an interesting conversation. My job requires me to be plugged in to social media of all kinds and keep tabs on what's going on, and I've read a few studies and academic papers on changing values around privacy. The long and short of it is, no one quite knows where it's all headed as far as I can see.
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Well spoken (boy do I appreciate that today
) and interesting thoughts.
You show the common (and most commonly male) tendency to emphasize the wrong risks and thus trivialize the concept of privacy, IMO. (For instance, I have yet to hear anyone explain how people avoid an enhanced risk of identity theft in this brave new world you're painting. Hopefully technology will cut both ways on that.)
I love the tech and am not the least bit Luddite, nor particularly "stodgy" as relates to the evolution of the Web.
But I've had plenty of other reasons besides privacy to hate Facebook from the beginning. For one, I have the classic Scorpio power and control issues and cannot stand getting caught in a crowd and dragged into anything. I got more alienated when people started telling me that I "had" to be on it for career networking purposes, yeah, right.
I hate Facebook because even if you aren't signed on, your friends are, every business you patronize wants you to be its fan, every TV anchorperson wants you to use it to send them your man-in-the-street wisdom… and now all your frequented Web sites have those stupid like buttons, aarghh. It just gets harder to avoid every day. I also hate it because people do silly shallow things on it, because it's visually boring, and because my page has to look like everyone else's (see "power and control" above). I always preferred the MySpace model, mess and all.
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comment via gizmodo's post: Someone on another blog pointed out the irony of Zuck sufferring because his "private" comments were released to the public.
irony is so delicious…
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@billy – Yea…though, if you think about it, it sort of serves his point, doesn't it?
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