TV review: Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse is an enjoyable documentary

Zuckerberg wore t-shirts on telly and welcomed Barack Obama to address Facebook employees. I warmed to this version.

The longer Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse (Sky Documentaries and NOW) goes on, the worse it gets. Not because it sucks but because Facebook and Zuckerberg were fun and foolish at the start and ended up as The-Monsters-to-Blame-for-Everything.

Facebook was cool back in 2010. The social media platform was seen as a vital agent in bringing people together during the Arab Spring revolutions, regarded as a good thing unless you were a repressive dictator with shoddy views on women. 

Zuckerberg wore t-shirts on telly and welcomed Barack Obama to address Facebook employees. I warmed to this version, the cocky geeky kid who may have believed he was bringing people together on his network — or maybe he was just in it for power and money. Either way, he’s a compelling character. 

He tells a friend people are dumb for giving him all their data for his original Facebook platform in Harvard, but teenagers always think that everyone else is dumb.

He signs his correspondence as ‘Master and Commander, Enemy of the State’, which is full of brash energy. What other kind of person is going to change the world?

I also think he really believed Facebook didn’t need to regulate what was said on the platform, because humans are basically good and that will keep people in line.

And then along came Donald Trump. Trump understood that Facebook gave him access to people on an emotional level, so he set about playing on their fear and prejudices to get them to vote for him in the 2016 presidential election. A few Facebook clips of the stuff he said about Mexicans, Muslims and his opponents reminded us that you can’t rely on Trump’s better nature.

Already tarnished by its association with Trump, Facebook was then rocked by a whistle-blower who presents evidence the company put profits before the safety of, among other groups, teenage girls.

Zuckerberg responds by changing the company name to Meta — it remains to be seen how that pans out.

The documentary is an enjoyable 90 minutes, although we’re left guessing about what kind of man Zuckerberg has become, living off scraps of clues. It’s telling to watch the self-assured 20-year-old geek morph into a stony-faced robot, natural instincts coached out of him, as if he’s afraid he’ll wake up and no longer be one of the most powerful men in the world. We’ll have to wait a bit to get his side of the story.