The replies to Collins’s tweet were full of suspicion. These had to be spam, or bots gravitating toward any video with sufficient engagement, or an astroturfing campaign organized by Facebook’s PR team. There could not possibly be this many people who love Mark Zuckerberg this much. Fast Company quickly published a piece that said the comments “sure look censored”; minutes later, Facebook was on the record with several outlets denying any interference. When a post or video has an extraordinarily high volume of comments, Facebook automatically sifts through them using “ranking signals” to filter out inauthentic or “low-quality” posts, a spokesperson told The Washington Post, but nothing was different for this particular stream.
Once the stream ended, it was easy to go back and find negative comments (“LIZARD,” “Liar,” “Oppressor of free will, free speech, and the king of manipulation of the weak-minded!”), as well as a fair amount of total gibberish, but it was also fairly obvious that the thousands-upon-thousands of super-positive comments were not from bots. They were too specific and strange not to be real.
Daphne Keller: Facebook restricts free speech by popular demand
The idea that some people might love Mark Zuckerberg should not have been entirely surprising—Ashley Feinberg reported more than three years ago on “the bizarre world of unsolicited Mark Zuckerberg fan art,” which is exactly what it sounds like (my favorite is the one where Zuckerberg is cast among the Avengers). There are quite a few Mark Zuckerberg fan clubs on Facebook, several of which have more than 1,000 members.
Clicking on 50 of the most enthusiastic live-stream comments at random led me to entirely authentic-looking profiles, and messaging people who posted them led me to a dozen entirely authentic conversations with avowed Mark Zuckerberg fans.
“I love my Facebook. I’ve learned more about life than any school or college could teach me, thank you so much for creating Facebook, Mark, God bless,” Zen Shabbar, a Jordanian man who now lives in California wrote on the side of the live-stream, appending four hearts and four prayer-hand emoji.
When I wrote to him on Facebook Messenger, he said he “absolutely” considers himself a fan of Zuckerberg’s, as does his 23-year-old son. He typically makes a point of watching Zuckerberg’s speeches, he told me, and the only other CEO he has ever felt similarly about was Steve Jobs. Though the past few years of privacy scandals have bothered him, he still feels that Zuckerberg is a “remarkable young man” who deserves his affection. “I think he created something wonderful and brought people closer to each other,” he added.
Almost everyone I spoke with agreed that they would use the word fan to describe their relationship to Zuckerberg, and many mentioned that they were endeared to him by the way his “humble” appearance contrasted with his otherworldly technological feats.