Science & Tech Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg’s language wraps a corporate growth plan in the moral glow of a civil-rights slogan. “Huge need” and “huge opportunity” sit side by side like twin engines: one implies obligation, the other implies upside. That pairing is the tell. He’s not only describing connectivity as a public good; he’s framing it as a once-in-a-generation land grab where the company that lays the rails gets to write the rules of the station.

The rhetoric leans hard on democratic imagery - “everyone…connected,” “everyone a voice” - but it quietly collapses “voice” into “platform.” In that world, empowerment is mediated by the same infrastructure that monetizes attention and harvests data. The subtext is paternalistic in a Silicon Valley way: society will be “transformed,” but by builders, at builder speed, with builder incentives. “Unprecedented” does double duty, signaling ambition to investors and inevitability to critics: if the scale is historically unique, then the standard forms of accountability start to look quaint.

Context matters: this is the mid-2010s connectivity-and-expansion era, when Facebook’s mission narrative (and projects like Internet.org/Free Basics) pitched itself as global development. Critics heard digital colonialism: offering curated internet access through a private gatekeeper, especially in the Global South, under the banner of altruism. Calling it “the most important problem we can focus on” is a strategic absolutism. It narrows the moral horizon until competing priorities - privacy, labor, local media ecosystems, political manipulation - can be treated as secondary bugs rather than core costs.

It works because it flatters the audience’s idealism while normalizing the company’s central role: progress, delivered at scale, by one platform.