He Started by Rating the 'Hotness' of His Female Classmates. Now He’s Fined $375 Million for Exploiting Children.

Before the billion dollar lawsuits and the congressional hearings, there was Facemash.

In a dorm room at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t set out to connect the world together in the metaverse. He set out to degrade every woman on campus to prove himself. And… he was rewarded for it. He was incentivized to treat human beings as data points, and to view privacy as a hurdle rather than a fundamental human right.

Two decades later, the bill is finally due. But the cost isn’t being paid by Zuckerberg—it’s being paid by the millions of children his algorithms have fed to predators.

A jury in New Mexico found on Tuesday that the social media giant’s platforms are enabling child exploitation and imposed a $375 million penalty. While it still pales in comparison to the $200 billion of revenue Meta made in 2025, justice is starting to finally served as New Mexico is the first state to hold Meta accountable in court.

New Mexico Attorney-General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, accused the company of allowing predators unfettered access to underage users and connecting them with victims, often leading to real-world abuse and human trafficking.

In undercover investigations like Operation MetaPhile, predators identified and contacted accounts posing as children within minutes of account creation.

They want us to believe that if you use the internet, exploitation is just the price of usage.

It isn’t. We have been conditioned to blame the screen, but really, we should be scrutinising the creator who created the hot garbage in the first place.

I mean if a man is willing to degrade his female classmates for a website, we shouldn’t be surprised when he risks a whole generation’s safety for a quarterly profit?

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Where it all began: Harvard ‘04

Remember The Social Network?

Back in 2010, Jesse Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg in the biopic alongside Andrew Garfield, and Armie Hammer, which documents the early days of Facebook and how Zuckerberg betrayed his close friend Eduardo Saverin to get there. The movie is full of twists and turns that it’s easy to forget that before Zuckerberg created Facebook, he made a website to rank his female classmates at Harvard by attractiveness.

Why Zuckerberg Created Facemash

The Social Network starts in 2003, with college student Zuckerberg heartbroken after his girlfriend dumps him for being self-centered and arrogant (funny, he’s so different now, right…)

Instead of reflecting on how he could work on himself, like any emotionally mature person would, he had the brilliant idea to type up a blog post where he calls her a “bitch” and accuses her of “false advertising” for wearing a push-up bra. It’s an obviously normal and healthy way to process a breakup (do take note of my sarcasm), but of course, Zuck doesn't stop there.

He decides to cope with the breakup by getting drunk and hacking into the Harvard’s server, and just stole pictures from his female classmates, and asked his friend to build an algorithm to help rank them.

And that leads us to the launche of Facemash, a website where guys could rank women based on their attractiveness. The website becomes so popular that the Harvard network actually crashes. And to no one’s surprise, the women are disgusted by this lowly misogynistic behaviour.

In reality, it actually took Zuckerberg almost a week to build it. He did hack into the university’s online directories to download the I.D. photos of female undergraduates. Facemash did allow users to rate which of two women was “hotter.” The homepage did say “Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes.” He really did blog about the whole process. What a nerd am I right…

And boy did it go viral. By the end of it’s launch day, October 31, over 22,000 votes had been cast. Facemash was only live for just about two days, as it was reportedly taken down November 2. But the damage was done.

In the aftermath, Zuckerberg was punished by Harvard for “breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy” and was almost expelled. But the framework used in Facemash was seemingly later repurposed for his new website, Facebook.

This incident showed his true colours: his evident sexism after getting his ego bruised by a breakup did not at all falter two decades later.

From Facemash to Facebook

Zuckerberg was asked about the Facemash website during a 2018 congressional hearing. Zuckerberg admitted to creating Facemash his sophomore year of college but claims it had nothing to do with the creation of Facebook.

He claimed that “Facemash was a prank website that I launched in college, in my dorm room, before I started Facebook. There was a movie about this, or it said it was about this, it was of unclear truth. The claim that Facemash was somehow connected to the development of Facebook, it isn’t, it wasn’t... It actually has nothing to do with Facebook.”

It’s possible that the only thing that connects Facemash and Facebook is that they were created around the same time (and the names are similar), but the creation of Facemash set the tone for Zuckerberg’s questionable moral code.

Decades later, Zuckerberg and his beloved Facebook was involved in many scandals regarding censorship, privacy breaches, and its known impact on mental health.

In 2003, Zuckerberg needed to hack Harvard’s server to get the photos of his female classmates. In 2026, he’s convinced us to wear the cameras on our faces and surveil strangers.

What a genius invention

The Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses have essentially turned the ‘hot-or-not’ algorithm into a mobile surveillance unit.

Recently, researchers demonstrated how these glasses can be paired with facial recognition software to “dox” strangers in real-time. By simply looking at a woman on the street, a user can instantly pull up her name, home address, and phone number. It is the 20 year old successor to Facemash: a tool designed to strip women of their autonomy and privacy for the sake of a some technical ‘advancement’.

The Illusion of Consent

Just as the women at Harvard never consented to their ID photos being uploaded to a ranking site, women in public spaces now have no way to opt out of being recorded by someone wearing Meta glasses. Like how can you tell if some stranger came up to you, had a nice conversation and then uploaded it without your consent? And it ended up getting more than 30,000 views in the span of a week before a friend alerted you?

While the glasses have a small LED light to indicate recording, it is easily covered and unseen. The point is that it recreates the exact same dynamic of Zuckerberg in his dorm room — men sitting behind a screen deciding how to profit off of women without their permission.

A Platform Model Built on Degradation

The common thread from Zuckerberg’s college days to the current Meta era is plain misogyny. Whether it’s for clout or a ‘harmless prank’ (his words not mine), he has mastered the practice of exploiting our safety for profit.

The ending of The Social Network shows a lonely Zuckerberg hitting “refresh” on a profile page. It frames him as some kind of tragic, misunderstood genius but the reality is anything but. Zuckerberg didn’t just build a social media platform that blew up, he built a blueprint for how to monetize the loss of our privacy.

Whether it’s objectifying college women by how attractive they are in 2003 or providing the lens to track a woman to her front door in our day and age, the goal remains the same: total data dominance at the expense of human safety.

The Social Network is a fictionalized version of the Facebook story, but I think it’s honest about who Zuckerberg is.

When he created Facemash, he showed the world that he was willing to degrade his very own classmates at Harvard nonetheless, just to prove that he could create a good website.

He was then rewarded for stabbing friends in the back after creating Facebook and became a billionaire as the CEO, incentivizing his immoral behavior. Billions of dollars and a handful of lawsuits later, we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s willing to risk his customer’s privacy for a quick buck.

We are past the point of doing digital detoxes or deactivating accounts. We are in a fight for our own digital autonomy. The courts are finally punishing the platforms, but the law is slow to move. Stop being a mere user and continue being a criticiser.

Conclusion

Tech oligarchs don’t care about the hours you lost doomscrolling on their god forsaken app. They couldn’t give a shit if your 14 year old daughter gets DMs from pedophiles. And they certainly don’t loose sleep over women being stalked by their ex’s using their stupid Ray-Ban glasses.

Maybe you already know this, but social media is deliberately created to make you and some insecure teenager’s life hell.

Let’s not wait around for Big Tech to fix the hot mess it created in our lives, so I’m building an initiative designed to reclaim digital safety by distributing free books about tech-facilliated abuse.

I’m hitting 2 birds with one stone by:

• Getting a generation of “iPad kids” back into physical books for free.

• Teaching them to identify and protect themselves from predators before the algorithm can even suggest them.

Are you in?