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Despite a strong start to the year, Meta Platforms (META) has spent the past month trending downward and losing value, like most of its Magnificent 7 peers.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg opted to make significant changes following President Donald Trump's election, but so far, they haven’t helped boost share prices. His decision to end fact-checking on Facebook and replace it with a system that mirrors X’s Community Notes doesn’t seem to be well received by its users.
Seen as a Trump ally after he attended the January 2025 inauguration, Zuckerberg has faced significant backlash from his user base, some of whom have deleted their Facebook and Instagram accounts and joined Bluesky.
A Facebook rival that has surged in popularity recently, Bluesky has benefitted considerably from the anti-Zuckerberg sentiment that has overtaken social media since November 2024.
However, a new trend makes it clearer than ever how the public feels about the Meta founder and CEO.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber recently worse a shirt mocking Mark Zuckerberg and social media users have responded well. Getty/TheStreet
Zuckerberg is a victim of fashion in more ways than one
Last week, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took the stage at South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas to a cheering crowd. She spoke about her company and the direction in which she hopes to see it progress, also providing detailed context on the future of the social media field.
Graber’s speech drew considerable applause from the large audience but for many, the key takeaway from the event, seems to have been not what the Bluesky CEO said, but what she wore. Her choice of shirt has attracted significant attention since then, not just for its message but what it represents.
The shirt in question bore the words “Mundus sine Caesaribus” a classical Latin phrase that translates to “a world without Caesars.” That sentence may not be widely known, but many people recognized it as being inspired by a shirt worn by Meta META CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event in September 2024.
Zuckerberg drew considerable criticism when he gave an address wearing a shirt he had designed himself with the words “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” translating to “Zuck or nothing.” Scholars of Latin will recognize it as a reference to the popular phrase “Caesar or nothing.”
Tech followers, on the other hand, quickly recognized Graber’s shirt as a clear attempt to mock Zuckerberg. Many social media users asked where they could get one, and the company quickly filled the market needs, offering the shirt for $40 on worldwithoutcaesars.com.
As it turns out, Bluesky may have inadvertently stumbled upon a new growth driver. In a recent post, COO Rose Wang revealed that the company had “had more money coming in today than we did the last two years selling custom domains.”
She later found another way to mock Zuckerberg, stating that “Bluesky’s tshirt pivot will be called Threads,” highlighting the X alternative launched by Meta in July 2023, largely considered to be unsuccessful.
The fact that this shirt has become so popular so quickly highlights an underlying truth that many people despise Zuckerberg enough to spend money to mock him.
But beyond that, the concept proposed by the phrase “a world without Caesars” resonates with many people, indicating deep feelings of resentment toward Zuckerberg and likely, toward the world of big tech.
Why is the proposed “world without Caesars” so popular?
The evolution of social media, and the public’s view toward the man responsible for its rise, is worth a closer look as we consider why anti-Zuckerberg shirts are the season’s must-have item for many. Despite his highly negative public image now, Zuckerberg didn’t always draw this type of ire.
When Facebook became the dominant social media platform in the mid 2000s, Zuckerberg enjoyed an image as a young entrepreneur who had built the cool, trendy startup that had made communication fun. He never drew real controversy and stayed out of political matters, seeming to focus on building a fun, digital community for his users.
That changed in 2018 when a bombshell story broke that Facebook had allowed British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access the personal data of 50 million users. Zuckerberg’s company tried to fix its reputation, going so far as to run TV ads promising to “do better,” but nothing proved effective at restoring public trust.
Since Trump’s election, Zuckerberg has made a string of decisions that haven’t played well with social media users, ranging from ending fact-checking on Facebook to donating $1 million dollars to the president’s inaugural fund. He’s also replaced the company’s global head of policy with a prominent right-wing lobbyist.
All these decisions have pushed users away from Facebook, sending them flocking to Bluesky in droves. Perhaps if Zuckerberg had stuck to focusing on creating better platforms and less on political gambits, the people who once used Facebook wouldn’t want to imagine “a world without Caesars.”
