Success Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

“Connectivity is a human right” is Silicon Valley’s most effective moral shortcut: it takes a business objective (get everyone online) and reframes it as an ethical inevitability. Zuckerberg’s phrasing borrows the gravity of the UN charter but keeps the noun conveniently vague. “Connectivity” doesn’t mean speech, privacy, labor protections, or democratic accountability. It means access to networks - and, in practice, access to the networks his company mediates. The sentence works because it compresses a sprawling debate about power into a clean, benevolent-sounding claim: if you oppose Facebook’s expansion, you’re not criticizing a corporation; you’re standing in the way of human rights.

The context matters. Facebook’s rise tracked a real shift: social participation, job hunting, news consumption, even public services increasingly require an internet presence. So the line lands emotionally as a promise to the excluded. But the subtext is corporate: the right being asserted is not just to the internet in the abstract, but to a particular model of the internet - ad-funded, engagement-maximizing, and data-hungry.

Calling connectivity a right also flips responsibility. If connection is a right, then platforms become quasi-infrastructure, deserving deference and scale. Yet rights language implies duties: non-discrimination, due process, transparency, and safeguards against harm. Zuckerberg invokes the prestige of rights talk while sidestepping the hard part: who governs the connective tissue of society when it’s owned, optimized, and moderated by a private company.