Jewish Invention Myths: Facebook

One of the more persistent ‘jewish invention’ myths – and one that I myself believed to be true at one time – is the idea that ‘Facebook’ was created ex nihilo by the jew Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. (1)

The truth – made somewhat famous by the 2010 film ‘The Social Network’ – is that this is complete and utter nonsense and that Mark Zuckerberg stole much of what became ‘Facebook’ from three fellow students while he was studying at Harvard University and they could prove it.

Ben Mezrich – himself a jew – is one of the principal authorities on the origins of ‘Facebook’ and while he doesn’t deny that ‘Facebook’ was in – and of itself – a ‘jewish invention’ he also firmly acknowledges that Zuckerberg stole/plagiarised much of the basic idea, technical know-how and even some of the code for ‘Facebook’ from those other three Harvard students: Cameron Winkelvoss, Tyler Winkelvoss and Divya Narendra. (2)

Mezrich’s opinion that the Winkelvoss twins in particular were the true origins of ‘Facebook’ has only strengthened over time as he himself confesses in a 2019 article in ‘Vanity Fair’ where he explains how:

‘Cameron had first met Zuckerberg in the Kirkland dining hall in October of 2003, when he, Tyler, and their friend Divya Narendra sat down with him to discuss the social network that they had been building over the previous year. Over the next three months, the four of them met several more times in Zuckerberg’s dorm room and exchanged more than 50 e-mails discussing the site. However, unbeknownst to the twins and Narendra at the time, Zuckerberg had secretly started working on another social network. In fact, he registered the domain name thefacebook.com on January 11, 2004, four days prior to their third meeting.

Three weeks later, he launched thefacebook .com. Cameron, Tyler, and Narendra only learned about it while reading the campus paper, The Harvard Crimson. Cameron soon confronted Zuckerberg over e-mail. Zuckerberg responded: “If you would like to meet to discuss any of this, I am willing to meet with you alone. Let me know.” But Cameron had passed, feeling the trust had been irreparably damaged. What good could come of trying to reason with someone who was capable of acting the way he did? The only thing Cameron felt they could do at that point was rely on the system—first, by petitioning the Harvard administration and Harvard president Larry Summers to step in and enforce the honor codes pertaining to student interactions clearly delineated in the student handbook, and then, when that failed, reluctantly turning to the courts—and now here they were, four long years later.…

[…]

Over the next 10 minutes, Cameron did most of the talking. He started by extending an olive branch. He congratulated Zuckerberg on all that he had accomplished over the years since Harvard. How he’d turned thefacebook .com—a college-based social network that had started as a small, exclusive Web site connecting Harvard kids with one another—into Facebook, a worldwide phenomenon that would eventually draw in more than one-fifth of the population worldwide.

Cameron held himself back from stating the obvious: he, Tyler, and Narendra believed, deeply and firmly, that Facebook had actually risen out of their own idea—a social networking site initially called Harvard Connection, later renamed Con­nectU, that was aimed at helping college students connect with one another online.

Narendra and the twins had designed ConnectU based on their shared epiphany that a person’s e-mail address was not only a good way to authenticate their identity but also a good proxy for his or her real-life social network. The Harvard registrar issues @harvard.edu e-mail addresses only to Harvard students. Goldman Sachs issues @goldmansachs.com e-mail addresses only to Goldman Sachs employees. This framework would give the ConnectU network an integrity that other social networks such as Friendster and Myspace lacked. It would organize users in a way that allowed them to find one another more easily and connect in a more meaningful way. It was, in fact, the same framework that would soon launch the sophomore computer-science major they hired into worldwide fame and Internet dominance.

In the twins’ opinion, the only networks Zuckerberg was familiar with were computer ones. From their own social interactions with him, it was clear that Zuckerberg was more comfortable talking with machines than with people. Seen this way, it actually made a lot more sense if the world’s biggest social network was in fact the offspring of an unlikely marriage between the twins and Zuckerberg, as opposed to Zuckerberg’s brainchild alone.’ (3)

Mezrich’s point here is simple in that Zuckerberg was – in effect – a not particularly innovative code monkey in 2003 who didn’t come up with ‘Facebook’ in a vacuum, but rather after he simply adapted the innovative ideas that the Winkelvoss twins and Narendra had been working on since 2002 with their own social networking site and which Zuckerberg was first introduced to in October 2003.

Zuckerberg took his time in understanding what the Winkelvoss twins and Narendra had created in ‘ConnectU’ hence the over 50 emails back and for between the group outlining and explaining the concept only for Zuckerberg to take what they had been discussing and secretly creating his own version of the concept in form of ‘Facebook’ in early 2004 and then forcing the Winkelvoss twins in particular to go after him via the Harvard honour code – which Zuckerberg had outright broken – and then successfully in the courts: leading to an out of court monetary settlement of $65 million in 2008. (4)

Indeed, Zuckerberg all but admitted he stole the ideas behind ‘Facebook’ from the Winkelvoss twins and Narenda in 2008 according to Mezrich (5) and in so doing made low but still substantial legal settlement offer in the form of the $65 million, which allowed both the Winkelvoss twins and Zuckerberg to move on with their lives.

So put another way; we can see that Zuckerberg didn’t create what become ‘Facebook’ ex nihilo but rather he copied and plagiarised the ideas and code for ‘ConnectU’ that the Winkelvoss twins and Divya Narendra had been working on for a year before he’d even thought about it.

So, no ‘Facebook’ isn’t a ‘jewish invention’ at all but rather a ‘jewish plagiarism’.

References

(1) For example, see: https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions

(2) Cf. Ben Mezrich, 2009, ‘The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal’, 1st Edition, Doubleday: New York

(3) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/inside-the-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss-twins-cage-match

(4) Ibid.; https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13886534

(5) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/inside-the-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss-twins-cage-match