Success Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg’s most audacious move here is to smuggle a business model inside a moral category. Lining Facebook up against Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft sounds like an industry comparison, but it’s really a reframe: those companies sell devices, services, and infrastructure; Facebook, he implies, sells belonging. “We are trying to build a community” is a strategic sentence because it elevates product decisions into civic intent, as if the platform’s primary output were social cohesion rather than attention, data, and ad inventory.

The timing of this rhetoric matters. Facebook’s rise coincided with growing suspicion that Big Tech wasn’t just disruptive, but extractive. “Community” functions as a soft shield against that critique: it recasts surveillance-adjacent mechanics (profiling, algorithmic ranking, behavioral nudges) as the necessary plumbing of togetherness. It also anticipates regulation by borrowing the language of public goods. Communities, after all, are things we protect; monopolies are things we break up.

There’s subtext in the word “different,” too. Zuckerberg isn’t only distinguishing Facebook’s mission; he’s differentiating its accountability. If Facebook is a community builder, then controversies about misinformation, polarization, harassment, and political manipulation can be framed as messy human problems rather than platform design failures. The line quietly asks for a kind of forgiveness: don’t judge us like a retailer or an operating system. Judge us like a town square.

It’s a powerful pitch because it’s emotionally legible. It’s also revealing: when a corporation insists it’s building “community,” it’s usually negotiating consent for the ways it organizes people, and profits from how they behave once organized.