Must we say it again? Must we really state the bleeding obvious and point to a fact almost everyone on this planet has surely come to realise by now?
You know the man responsible for allowing lies and inaccuracies to spread during the US election.
You know the man who emerged from that turbulent campaign accountable to no one and boasting enormous power and influence.
You know this man because he could well become the most dangerous person on the planet.
Mark Zuckerberg and his lieutenants have gone on a charm offensive amid a global backlash against Facebook and Google, the giants of the internet.Credit:Paul Sakuma
All hail the Caesar of the 21st century – Mark Zuckerberg. You know, the Facebook guy.
He fooled a lot of us for a while there with his casual T-shirt and sneaker-wearing persona, his dazzling do-gooder pleas for the world to unite and live in peace under the banner of his philanthropic organisation, his promises to connect us all so no one would ever have to feel lonely again. Why, the man was surely the love child of Bob Geldof and Mother Teresa.
But Zuckerberg's nerd-with-a-naive dream-of-uniting-the-world routine wore thin years ago. And Facebook's conduct during the election only magnified its role as the greatest shaper of influence and opinion on the planet.
Facebook was the primary conduit for countless hoax stories during the campaign. And when half of all Americans use the social media platform as their primary source for news and information – our figures are just as staggering with 95 per cent of Australians having an account and spending up to 12.5 hours a week engaging with it – its ability to nudge and lead its audience is almost unprecedented. No Roman emperor had it so good.
There was the false story shared almost a million times that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump. That Taylor Swift had voted for Trump. And who could count the number of articles, all unsourced, that Hillary Clinton was suffering from a mental condition or a terminal illness?
Zuckerberg's response has been glib and unsatisfactory. "A pretty crazy idea," he said of the suggestion that Facebook had influenced the election. "News and media are not the primary things people do on Facebook, so I find it odd when people insist we call ourselves a news or media company in order to acknowledge its importance. We are a technology company because the main thing we do across many products is engineer and build technology to enable all these things."
Ah, yes. The old we're-just-a-bunch-of-nerds-connecting-everyone argument. Geeks who can't write a simple algorithm to rid Facebook of false news?
Remember when Facebook was just the new kid on the social media block? The big bully everyone feared was Google, which has gone on to become the largest cash register in history, a worldwide data-processing factory singularly driven to leaving its fingerprint on every cash transaction on the planet.
But Facebook, despite the constant protestations of Zuckerberg that it is a civic-minded entity devoted to connecting every living soul on Earth – and, judging by the near impossibility of closing down your Facebook account, we should include the dead as well – is also about peddling influence and shaping ideas.
Not only does it boast more than a billion daily active users, it has usurped traditional media organisations bound by fossilised government regulations and transparent codes of conduct by taking over as the world's primary content platform, allowing individuals to filter what content interests them.
All good, some of you will shout. More power to the individual instead of those biased media barons of days past. But Facebook never accounts for its algorithms. There is no transparency when it comes to how its controversial "trending topics" are decided, despite denials these are skewed towards liberal point of view stories.
I stopped using Facebook a few years ago. I grew tired of the incessant friend requests, the intrusive email reminders, the constant grab for more information about my life and where I was eating/shopping/drinking and breathing at any one time. Is my life any the poorer? I think I'm better off because the less Zuckerberg knows about me, the safer I feel.
A friend recently confessed she would like to quit Facebook too but feared the consequences. Last time she tried it invitations to parties and gatherings suddenly stopped. She was cast adrift, unnoticed and waving furiously at a group of friends too obsessed with looking down and checking their news feeds to look up.
I'm going to encourage her to get away from it again. Surely the message from the US last week was loud and clear.
Mark Zuckerberg? He's no friend of ours.
Garry Linnell is co-presenter of The Breakfast Show on 2UE Talking Lifestyle.
Garry Linnell is a Fairfax Media columnist and the co-presenter of the 2UE Breakfast Show.