What Zuckerberg Fears Most

Alex Wong/Getty Images

What keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night?

If you guessed taxation, government regulation, or deportation to El Salvador, you’re wrong.

Zuckerberg is afraid of laughter.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Facebook’s penchant for deleting anti-Trump posts (including mine).

I became aware of a new tactic in Facebook’s censorship campaign this week, when the people at Closer to the Edge—one of the top US Politics Substacks—tried to hit a “HAHA” emoji in response to one of my Facebook posts and were prevented from doing so:

The thwarted emoji-users wrote about Zuckerberg’s zero-tolerance policy on laughter in a lengthy post here. Let me share a key excerpt:

Apparently, laughing at satire now violates the Terms of Joy and Community Standards for Irony.

Maybe we did it too often. Maybe we laughed too fast. Maybe the algorithm flagged us for showing signs of human behavior on a platform built for advertising.

But let’s be honest: Facebook’s not trying to stop spam. It’s trying to stop anything that spreads faster than their approved corporate content. Laughter—real, resonant, defiant laughter—is viral.

Zuckerberg’s ban on laughter is part of a larger anti-comedy campaign under Trump’s fascist regime.

Ann Telnaes, the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist, resigned from the Washington Post after her editor killed a drawing of hers that mocked Trump’s billionaire quislings (including WaPo owner Jeff Bezos). And the hilarious Amber Ruffin was dropped from the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which went ahead with no comedian whatsoever.

Ann Telnaes

What do Trump, Zuckerberg, and the rest of these authoritarian gangsters have to fear from laughter?

Everything.

As Mark Twain wrote in The Mysterious Stranger (1916), “Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

Keep laughing.

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