Success Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

A line like "We don't sell data; we don't allow anyone to sell data" is less a confession of virtue than a legalistic magic trick. Zuckerberg frames the controversy in the narrowest, most defensible terms: the literal sale of user data as a commodity. In doing so, he sidesteps the core criticism of Facebook's business model, which is not that your information gets auctioned off in neat little files, but that it gets operationalized. Data is converted into targeting, prediction, and influence - and those outputs are what advertisers actually pay for.

The structure matters. The first clause is a pledge; the second is a show of authority. "We don't allow anyone" casts Facebook as regulator-in-chief of its own ecosystem, a company policing its borders with firm standards. It's an attempt to restore trust by emphasizing control and prohibition, the language of gates and guardianship rather than extraction.

Context does the heavy lifting. This line lands in the post-Cambridge Analytica era, when the public learned that "sharing" could mean a third party turning personality quirks and political leanings into a persuasion machine. Zuckerberg isn't arguing that Facebook is harmless; he's arguing that critics are using the wrong verb. Not "sell", but "share", "access", "target", "optimize."

The subtext is a branding maneuver: if you can win the semantics, you can dull the outrage. It's a statement engineered for hearings, headlines, and reassurance - true in a courtroom sense, evasive in the way people actually experience being watched.