I'd like a transcript of your conversations when you were 19.

And I'd like to keep them around to bring them up over and over again out of context.

I agree that this being reposted in any Facebook-related thread is old and tired.

But I wouldn't dismiss the episode itself as irrelevant to assessing how Zuckerberg thinks. If anything, it should be a well known bit of history and already long baked into people's opinions.

And therefore it will always be "in context" when updating your opinion on Zuckerberg's (specifically) and Facebook's (broadly) trustworthiness.

You don't think Zuckerberg has updated a single opinion in the 15 years since that exchange?

Think about how different the world was 15 years ago. Think about how different of a person you are today versus just 4 years ago.

And on top of that, I'll share my opinion on the specific incident in question: the people who volunteered their personal information into a random web form distributed by a random student they didn't know...is by all measures...stupid. A 19 year old me might have even used the words "dumb fuck". So there you go.

My goal is not to defend Zuckerberg here. My goal is to defend people's right to be 19 and stupid/inexperienced. I'm also defending people's right to grow over the years.

Being 19 isn't a free pass to do anything. At 19 you are old enough to vote, drive, serve in the army, etc — and old enough to understand that words have consequences and that calling people "dumb fucks" when they give you their SSN is pretty cruel.

I'm not much older than 19 now, maybe you can use this conversation for your purpose.

The idea is not to hold people to their actions for all time. Even people who have been in jail are considered reformed. It's like someone holding you to your words when you were 4 and said you wanted to be an astronaut (maybe).