Cracked is a comedy channel on YouTube and this clip is supposed to be a comedy piece. It might funnier, if it weren’t a 100% factual editorial. Yes. It appears that Mark Zuckerberg, whose $56B net worth is $12B greater than Donald Trump’s estimated holdings, has been feeling out a 2020 run for President of the United States. By then, he will be old enough to qualify (the position requires that the candidate be at least 35 years of age).
Glossy spreads of Facebook Founder began to appear in Vanity Fair and Fortune around January 13th of this year, shortly after David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager joined the philanthropic Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, to lead its Policy Advocacy.
“‘He wants to be emperor’ is a phrase that has become common among people who have known him over the years,” is a direct quote from the article in Vanity Fair by Nick Bilton, who comes out in favor of Zuckerberg’s candidacy (?!)
Additional evidence of Zuckerberg’s intentions was his late-February launch of a “Listening Tour” of the Southern US, presumably, to better understand what he likely considers to be the alien life forms who inhabit the region. After his first foray, he posted, “I had lunch with community leaders in Waxahachie who shared their pride in their home and their feelings on a divided country” and “I met with ministers in Waco who are helping their congregations find deeper meaning in a changing world” and “We may come from different backgrounds but we all want to find purpose and authenticity in something bigger than ourselves.”
Terrifying. The comic presenter of this Cracked sketch half-jokes of the staunch Globalist, “You’re in charge of Facebook [with 1.8 billion active monthly users]…You can’t be the President. You own all of our information, all of our data. America is more divided than and ever and the Facebook helped us create our bubbles by using algorithms, to only show us things we like and things we already agree with.”
Even Zuckerberg agrees with this last sentiment. In his manifesto, Zuckerberg stated that social media, at its worst, “Oversimplifies important topics and pushes us toward extremes.”
Much more concerning, is a deleted passage from an earlier iteration of his manifesto, referring to Facebook’s use of Artificial Intelligence for surveillance, which said could lead to the development of robots to read peoples’ private messages, in search of things it deems “worrying” (!)
