Everyone Believed It Because They Were Already Afraid

The story ran in the Weekly World News—the same outlet that had recently confirmed aliens would invade in 2011 and that Megan Fox is a man—and it spread through the internet like something true. According to the fabricated interview, Zuckerberg had finally broken: Facebook has come completely out of control. The stress of leading this company has ruined my life. I must stop this madness. March 15th, 2011. All photos, videos, messages deleted. Take your data now or lose it forever.

Thousands of users responded with grief, fury, and something close to existential dread. A student named Denise Bradshaw was quoted: What the hell am I supposed to do now? I spend ten hours a day on Facebook. I can’t handle so much free time. Which is the most honest thing anyone has ever said about social media—delivered in the middle of a satirical panic, without meaning it as a joke.

Facebook denied it with a wink: We were not informed that we are closing and have a lot to do. Five hundred million users exhaled. The rumor collapsed. Normal service resumed, which meant everyone went straight back to the site that had just given them a minor breakdown.

What the hoax exposed—more clearly than any actual reporting had managed—was the particular texture of the dependency we’d built up by 2011. Not affection, not desire, but something closer to low-grade dread at the thought of the thing not being there. The Weekly World News had gotten the emotional shape of it right even while fabricating all the facts. The stress of running Facebook had not ruined Zuckerberg’s life. But the platform had quietly restructured everyone else’s, and nobody wanted to say that out loud until a satirical tabloid did it for them.