At one point in time, Mark Zuckerberg‘s Facebook mission statement was “Making the world more open and connected.” But as a little Hollywood flick has had us believing in the romanticised notion that the Meta chief may not know a thing about friendship, we’re back to square one. The big question in focus now is how his fortune-staking mission to connect people may not even involve real people soon enough.

Zuckerberg, who is currently in trouble due to an antitrust case that accuses Meta of illegally monopolising the social networking space, recently sat down for a podcast interview with Indian-American host Dwakesh Patel. During the interaction, which has now drawn the ire of social media users on X, he weighed in on the possibility of AI replacing human connections, noting that an average American has less than three friends despite wanting more.

“Here’s one stat from working on social media for a long time that I always think is crazy. The average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends,” he said. “An the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s something like 15 friends or something. At some point you’re like, ‘All right, I’m just too busy, I can’t deal with more people,’ but the average person wants more connection than they have.”

“There’s a lot of stuff that people ask… ‘Is this going to replace in-person connections or real-life connections?’ My default is that the answer is probably no,” he went on. “I think there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don’t have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

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He admitted that what he was implying may have stigma around it at present. Nonetheless, he claimed, “Overtime, we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things… are rational for doing it, and how it is adding value for their lives… The field is very early. There are handful of companies that are doing virtual therapist, virtual girlfriend-type stuff… but it’s very early.”

X users quickly dismissed the mere idea of ‘AI friends’

Social media users were quick to voice their aversion to all that Mark Zuckerberg had insinuated. “I hate everything about this,” someone commented under a viral video post snippet of the Meta boss’ recent interview. Some joked around, suggesting the Facebook founder was “trying to tell us something about himself.”

A third user pointed out that Zuckerberg was basically creating an “innovative solution” to the problem he created in the first place and had profited from. He compared the situation to “starting a fire while insisting there is no fire… then burning the house down, while saying the house didn’t burn down…and then finally admitting you did actually burn the house down and replacing it with a toy house.”

He explained the vicious cycle: “1) Create a ‘social network’ that disconnects people from each other in real life 2) Continue to insist that you are connecting the world, while pushing people further apart with increasingly addictive features that lead to more screen time, alienation and polarisation 3) Introduce AI ‘friends’ as an innovative solution to the problem you contributed to and profited from.”

Taking another dig at Mark Zuckerberg with the massive David Fincher directorial, Social Network, fresh in memory, the user argued, “Meta keeps missing the mark socially.” To expound his point, he then wrote, “• Confuses online interaction with real connection • Overcommitted to VR; most people find it odd, not essential • Thinks AI friends solve loneliness, when people crave real relationships,” adding this was all possibly a “byproduct of what excites Zuck based on his own personality… most people just aren’t wired like him socially.”

Mark Zuckerberg hate train spirals out of control

Yet another person bemoaned, “I see he’s reverted back to his robot tendencies in this version update. Sad to see it.” This particular remark echoed the comments of privacy and data ethics scholar Michael Zimmer (Marquette University), who was interviewed for the documentary “Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse,” which aired on Sky Documentaries in the UK last year.

Commenting on Zuckerberg’s supposed evolution since he cofounded Facebook over two decades ago, Zimmer said at the time, “One of the moments when that happened was an interview he gave, where there were really hot lights, there were some controversies going on and some really hard questions — he was sweating on stage.

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“From that point on, they brought in the corporate communication heavyweights and gave him some speech training. That’s when we start seeing the jokes about Zuckerberg as a robot, and that there’s kind of this coldness to how he engages.”

In present day, the comments section on X is overflowing with much backlash for Mark Zuckerberg, but this hate train is no thing of the new. In February, the Independent quoted a Pew Research Centre study, indicating that Americans hate the Meta boss more than Elon Musk, despite the latter’s overt involvement with the Trump administration as the DOGE leader. The poll showed that while approximately 42% of Americans are believed to have favourable views of Trump’s “First Buddy,” just 25% felt the same for Zuckerberg.

Did Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Social Network’ manage to cure loneliness?

Approval ratings weren’t the only stats working against the Meta CEO, a research paper titled, “Associations between social media use and loneliness in a cross-national population: do motives for social media use matter?,” published on the official website of the National Library of Medicine (US govt), also contended that social media use was not-so shockingly connected to loneliness.

Even without having to get into the lengthy findings of the journal, one finds the answer we’re looking for in the very abstract penned at the top. “Conclusions: Our findings suggest that people who use social media for the motive of maintaining their relationships feel lonelier than those who spend the same amount of time on social media for other reasons. While social media may facilitate social contact to a degree, they may not facilitate the type of contact sought by those who use social media primarily for this reason,” the paper’s abstract stated.”

Building on the same well-researched theory, visiting US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, told the Times of India in 2024, “A Gallup survey in 2023 showed that both in the US and India, around 20-25% of the respondents claimed they are struggling with loneliness.”

He added, “As we immerse ourselves in social media, which has fundamentally transformed how we relate to one another and we have a dialogue with one another, we are seeing rising rates of loneliness.”

And so, while Mark Zuckerberg hoped to connect people despite the physical distance between them, the loneliness paradox insists that we’re not only farther than ever from the people we care about, but also ourselves.