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The
33-year-old tech titan, who dropped out the college to found the
pioneering social network company, has been on a nostalgia trip
during the week leading up to Harvard's commencement. On
Tuesday, he live-streamed a visit to the dorm room where he
started the website he initially called "thefacebook.com" and
made available just to his classmates.
"This is literally where I sat. And I had my little laptop here
and this is where I programmed Facebook. It took me about two
weeks," Zuckerberg said in the video. "This is where it
happened."
Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has grown into the world's
largest online social network and inspired a host of
competitors, including Twitter Inc and Snapchat.
Today some 1.9 billion people use Facebook each month. Its broad
reach has made the company a lightning rod for controversy, most
recently for the ways that producers of fake news stories used
it to influence public opinion during the 2016 U.S. presidential
election and for a pair of incidents last month in which users
posted videos of two murders, one of them live.
The Menlo Park, California-based company has vowed to tackle
both problems and earlier this month said it would hire 3,000
new workers to speed up the removal of videos depicting murder,
suicide and other violent acts.
Zuckerberg's speech on the 381-year-old school's leafy campus in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, will not be the first by a successful
dropout who has returned to address a graduating class.
Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates spoke to graduates in 2007,
shortly after saying that he would step away from his day-to-day
role with the world's largest software company to focus his time
on philanthropy.
"Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree," Gates
joked to the crowd as he accepted an honorary law degree. "It
will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume."
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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