Mark Zuckerberg still thinks Facebook has made the world better

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Facebook turned 15 on Monday, and founder Mark Zuckerberg is feeling defensive about his creation's public image.

"As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society," Zuck wrote in a Facebook post, "there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasize the negative, and in some cases to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the Internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy."

Zuckerberg employed one of his favorite rhetorical tricks for defending Facebook: conflating Facebook with the Internet as a whole. It's true, as Zuckerberg writes, that the Internet has made the world more connected and that this has had a lot of positive consequences (as well as some negative ones).

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