Researcher tries to understand Mark Zuckerberg through his comments but fails

Nearly twenty years ago, Michael Zimmer, a privacy and data ethics researcher at Marquette University, began a project to understand then Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg through the comments he made in public life. When asked today if he can understand the billionaire, the researcher says he can't even after building a massive digital archive of the man.

In 2003, a 19 year old drunken Zuckerberg built a gag site to rate pictures of students on the Harvard University campus. Called Facemash, the site grew to become Facebook, a tool used by three billion people on the planet and a multi billion dollar business that also owns Instagram, Whatsapp, and a Twitter competitor, Threads.

The company's journey is the subject of a new documentary called Zuckerberg: King of the , scheduled for release next month. Zimmer's digital archive, Zuckerberg Files, was launched ten years ago with a similar intention to understand the man behind this enterprise. Zimmer, however, has not been able to peer into Zuckerberg's mind.

How it began Privacy Zimmer's interest in how Zuckerberg thinks began with the latter's comments about privacy a decade ago. The Marquette researcher began documenting blog posts, speeches, and interviews around privacy, which Zuckerberg was a part of. Zimmer told Business Insider that he found Zuckerberg's language around privacy quite "intriguing." As the CEO of companies that work by collecting data about its users, Zuckerberg has said that Harvard students were "dumb" to hand over their data.

Over the years, though, Zimmer began archiving more details about the CEO, who is now looking to build the untested metaverse world and has seen some sharp transformation. How Zuckerberg has changed In the early days of Facebook, Zuckerberg was more like a visionary, selling the potential of his social media site to connect the world.

Facebook's CEO was already a billionaire but was also confident of his product. This confidence allegedly turned into arrogance when Zuckerberg made his $1 billion bid for Instagram in 2012. Experts were confident that Zuckerberg was making a mistake and paying too high a price for the social media platform.

In hindsight, it was a wise decision that unlocked more growth for the company. The decision to use Instagram purchase also came in the years following the notorious interview where Zuckerberg was reluctant to remove his hoodie. The incident resulted in Zuckerberg becoming more measured in his public appearances.

The billionaire has also been alleged to be cold and more robotic since. Zuckerberg's maturity moment, however, is seen in his Capitol Hill testimony, in which he answered allegations about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections and questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

According to Zimmer, Zuckerberg controlled the conversation and differed greatly from the Harvard dropout in 2003. Zimmer points out that in the past few years, one can see the visionary in Zuckerberg again as he lays out his vision for the metaverse while also picking up new hobbies like ju jitsu, has plans for , all while coming across as more matured than Elon Musk.

Zimmer's problem, however, is that he needs to find out if these are put up appearances or the real Zuckerberg, the said. Even after 20 years of public life and comments, we do not know what Zuckerberg thinks or if we will have more transformations in the future..