The Facebook effect: How Mark Zuckerberg fashioned a generation in his own image - ABC Religion & Ethics

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5 days ago

You can hear Samuel Cornell discuss the way social media is cultivating regressive expressions of masculinity with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield.
Mark Zuckerberg's ubiquitous 'platforms' have hosted the lives, loves and losses of an entire generation of people. Gen Z — which refers broadly to those born between 1997 and 2012 — have lived out their lives on the social media and internet platforms created by some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people. People who attained their positions and status not through their emotional intelligence, their love of mankind or altruism, their desire to leave the world a better place, but through their insatiable desire for optimisation, 'connection', attention and power.
Is it any wonder we have a generation of people that mirror their creator? People largely deficient in emotional intelligence, limited in person-to-person interaction yet comfortable in front of a camera, dismissive of empathy, inattentive to signs of human depth. A generation whose operative norms and online virtues have been instilled by Meta's 'Community Standards' — standards that are themselves changeable when it is politically expedient to do so.
Not only is Silicon Valley shaping our sense of personhood, but Gen-Zers are even beginning to look like Zuck — what is now known as 'the Gen Z stare', the flat affect, deadpan expression, eyes glazed over.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attending the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump in the US Capitol Rotunda on 20 January 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool / Getty Images)
This isn't the shell-shocked state, the long stare of a person who's seen awful horrors during war. It's a mirror of the affective style of a generation raised online and in front of screens. We know that young people have been profoundly shaped by their near constant exposure to social media and the online world, but this influence is perhaps even deeper than it appears.
The world according to Zuck
Mark Zuckerberg's view of the world —described in some detail by Sarah Wynn-Williams in her recent book Careless People — suggests a man who cares more for power and control than he does true connection between people. What he seeks is efficient, expedient and, crucially, frictionless communication. Not the kind of communication that requires nuance and subtlety of expression, but one that can be binary coded. Which is to say, robotic communication. Strategic communication.
If we've learned nothing else from the last two decades, is that social media platforms reward strategy . Strategic presentation of the self. Strategic emotional display. Strategic posting. Strategic commenting and replying. Strategic adherence to whatever is trending. Zuckerberg has created a generation that excels in strategic 'authenticity', but which has little time for the kind of in-person communication that doesn't serve tactical means to an end.
Zuckerberg's own idiosyncrasies, his trademark robotic style of communication, have been reproduced in the behaviour of young people now entering the real world. No longer coddled by the relative safety of school, the workplace demands more of them than social media has prepared them up for. That is, unless they can all aspire to the same role of manipulation, curation and control as their creator — such as striving to become an influencer, a true acolyte of the algorithm.
Pick-and-mix identity
Gen Z grew up inside social media rather than with it. It cradled them from a very young age and has been ever present in their lives. It's where they formed their identities. It's where they learned that personal identity, with its ever-increasing atomisation and grouping, was essential — particularly if they want to have a defined presence on social media. To be seen online, you had to define what, exactly, you are. To belong, you had to sort yourself into little niche groups. Social media made personal identity a matter of public branding. Instagram bios became identity resumes — without one, who are you? It would make others uneasy to not know.
Zuckerberg's platform logic was built, fundamentally, on niche segmentation — that's the best way to direct advertisements your way. And who better to segment than the young, as early and quickly as possible for greater advertising revenue and effect.
Social media has made personal identity a matter of public branding. (Photo illustration by Chris Jackson / Getty Images)
This need to fit in with the algorithm isn't just about belonging. It's about survival in a space where visibility equals value. The platforms reward those who conform to their preferred categories. Be a brand, not a person. Be legible, not complex. You can shift identities, but only along recognised lines. Fluidity is fine (it's branded, after all), as long as it's easy to monetise.
The result? A generation confident in self-presentation online, where they understand the rules and dynamics, but uncomfortable offline. Life is designed for the feed as opposed to real world interactions.
The moral authority of Zuck's algorithm
We don't know how the algorithms really work. There's probably nothing else in the world with such a gigantic influence on the lives of so many, and so many young people, that is as secretive and unaccountable. Even the people who are supposed to legislate and regulate these platforms don't understand them.
Yet, young people have internalised the 'Community Standards' of the platforms they inhabit. Rules that are vague, erratic and inconsistent across contexts, but which carry much weight, nevertheless. For so many young users, these are the de jure limits to free speech and political expression.
Therefore, these platforms have effectively become the moral arbiters of a generation — morals that don't promote introspection, or knowledge of self, so much as self-presentation. They tell users what they are by the constant feedback mechanism of the algorithms: honing and honing and honing until you can be optimised online no more.
A cookie-cutter production of personas
What kind of persona does an online environment such as this produce? Personas that are at once conflict averse and hyper-critical, emotionally dulled yet highly reactive online, socially engaged and attuned to online developments yet personally disconnected.
Much like Zuckerberg's own low empathy, high control, distanced life of private jets and subservient employees, ever tinkering with code and obsessing about system performance, the people he's created concern themselves with metrics — likes, follows, shares — and rankings.
Zuckerberg's ambition to get everyone into the metaverse by means of digital avatars that can communicate with AI agents and fashion an artificial life, is the antithesis of all that it means to be a human and fulfil human desires. Especially in adolescence, growth and development require friction and real social feedback.
It's unclear where this will lead us. Perhaps Australia's social media minimum age regulation will be a positive start. We clearly need more than digital literacy. It seems there's enough focus on the digital as it is. Perhaps we need more focus on the physical, the tangible and material. The person to person. There doesn't always need to be 'an app for that'.
Samuel Cornell is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, researching public health, social media, and digital behaviour.