About

Zucked is a slang word that essentially means "to be screwed over by Mark Zuckerberg." It has been popularly used in several different contexts since Facebook's conception in 2007.

Origin

The earliest known use of Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder's last name, as a verb dates back to 2007, amidst the news media coverage of legal controversies between Zuckerberg and several classmates of Harvard University over the foundation and ownership of the social networking site. On November 3rd, 2007, Urban Dictionary user Bentheguyfromcambridge submitted an entry for "Zuckerberg,"^[1] defined as:

to steal an idea from someone who trusts you

Spread

In 2010, with Facebook's settlement of the lawsuits and continued expansion as the social networking empire, the meaning of the term "zucked" gradually evolved to convey any theft of an idea from a competitor, as defined by American tech entrepreneur and podcaster Jason Calacanis in his blog post.^[2]

Shortly after Facebook became a publicly traded company on May 18th, 2012, the company's stock began free-falling after its lead underwriters reduced the earning forecasts in the middle of the IPO process, leading to heavy financial losses for investors, including Zuckerberg himself who lost $3 billion dollars in three business days. As a result, the term took on a new meaning of taking a "sudden wealth loss" due to ill-advised investment, which became widely used by finance journalists in the news media coverage^[3] of Facebook's stock crash. According to Techopedia's^[9] definition:

Zucked refers to the sudden wealth loss investors and company executives experience when a dotcom stock plunges, destroying shareholders' inflated paper fortunes. This term originated in response to the decline of Facebook's stock following its IPO in May 2012, which cost Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, other company executives and investors worldwide billions of dollars.

In Fall of 2014, "Zucked" came to mean the act of Facebook deleting a person's account because they were suspected of using a "fake name."^[4] This policy came under scrutiny by people with non-western or non-traditional names, like the Irish,^[5] Native Americans,^[6] and the Vietnamese.^[7] It also drew criticism from the LGBTQ community, as the policy affected queer users using adopted names or pseudonyms.^[8]

Zucc

On May 27th, 2016, the Facebook page^[11] "Fucc the ":/memes/zucc>Zucc" was launched, featuring image macros and photoshopped pictures of Mark Zuckerberg. On June 6th, the Facebook Page^[13] "Utopian Raspberry – Modern Oasis Machine" posted a photoshopped image of Zuckerberg dancing captioned with the word "Zucc" (shown below, left). On June 27th, the Difficulty II Facebook^[12] page posted a Layers of Irony parody comic in which Mark Zuckerberg says "Zucc" to the Goose on Fire (shown below, right).

On August 10th, Urban Dictionary user NicholsSA submitted an entry for "zucc'd,"^[10] an alternate spelling of the word "zucked" which gained popularity during Facebook's crackdown on Weird Facebook pages.

On October 10th, 2016, YouTuber punpun uploaded part of a Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Live stream in which he asks commenters to explain the "zucc thing" (shown below). That day, the video reached the front page of the /r/youtubehaiku^[14] subreddit.

Search Interest

External References