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How Zuckerberg Made Your Kids the New Operating System




This isn’t about influencer culture. It’s about corporate colonisation of childhood and how Meta’s grand plan is bigger, colder, and more permanent than anyone wants to admit.


For more than a year now, I have been explaining what might be coming in my keynotes as soon as I heard about these:

The eyes nearly pop out of people's heads when they try to reconcile it.

And now Meta has formally announced what we all saw coming. It’s building a future of AI-generated influencers to front ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. These synthetic personalities will be trained on the tone, habits, and emotional appeal of real creators. No schedules. No agents. No limits. Zuckerberg calls it “personalised, conversational” advertising. What it really is: a future where trust is simulated and scaled. Where the raw material is your behaviour. And increasingly, your child’s.

There is no advertising industry anymore. Not in the way we once understood it...There is no advertising industry anymore. Not in the way we once understood it. Not with the glamour of Madison Avenue, the wit of British satire, or the disruptive weirdness of Australian creativity that once dared to put a gorilla behind a drum kit and make us feel something. That world is dead. What’s left is a performance engine fuelled by raw human data. And in this machine, your child isn’t the target. Your child is the platform.

Let’s stop pretending this was an accident.

Mark Zuckerberg and Co. didn’t just stumble into this future. It wasn’t an unforeseen by-product of social media growth or influencer culture. It was deliberate. Engineered. Just like Bill Gates gave away Microsoft Office to schools in the 90s, he ensured that an entire generation grew up fluent only in his software. I was working in the industry, and then I saw it, and I sold it. The strategy was breathtakingly simple and one I regret to this day: give it to them young, make it seem essential, and they will never leave.

We are living through that again. But this time, the product isn’t productivity software. It’s identity.

Digital Firstborns

The first child to have their ultrasound posted online was born in 2003. That child turns 22 this year. They were never offline. Not once. And Meta owns the pipeline through which their image travels.

From baby bump to birthday reels, children now arrive in a world where they are already a content category. Parenting forums have been replaced by Facebook groups. Scrapbooks became Instagram highlights. Storytime became livestreams. Every milestone is a marketing moment.

But this isn't just cultural creep. This is commercial colonisation. Meta didn’t just let this happen. They built for it.

The tools were made frictionless. The templates were optimised for reach. The language was seductive. “Boost post.” “Promote reel.” “Reach more people.” One-click interfaces that make selling your child’s face feel like uploading a memory.

Zuckerberg didn’t need to walk into your house and ask for your child’s biometric data. You gave it to him. Every time you posted a giggle. A dance. A face. A happy birthday darling I am so proud of you now your eleven.

And when enough people did it, when enough parents turned their children’s lives into digital scrapbooks for strangers, when enough milestones were mapped to metadata, when enough faces became training fodder for surveillance tech that would eventually be sold back to the highest bidder, he turned it into an empire.

Not just social media. A global archive of childhood. An unpaid, unregulated, 24/7 biometric feed of growing bodies and forming minds. A databank so rich in behavioural cues, facial recognition, voice patterns, emotional triggers, and geographic habits that it makes traditional intelligence agencies look amateur.

And no one hacked it. No one stole it. You uploaded it yourself.

Not because you didn’t care. Because you didn’t know.

You thought you were sharing with friends. You were training the next generation of AI.

You thought you were documenting their youth. You were feeding a system that will one day sell them back to themselves.

And by the time they’re old enough to opt out, they’ll already be profiled, predicted, and placed in a box. Not because of anything they did, but because of what we posted before they even understood what privacy meant.

This is the empire. And we are the builders.


 
 
 

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