The Mark Zuckerberg Harvard Commencement Speech meme stems from the 2017 ceremony where the Facebook founder finally received his honorary degree and delivered the keynote address. Despite the speech's earnest themes of 'purpose' and 'community,' the internet fixated on Zuckerberg’s notoriously stiff public persona. This gave rise to the 'Zuckerberg is a robot' or 'lizard person' tropes, with users adding captions that frame his speech as a series of programmed subroutines or attempts to mimic human emotion. The meme is widely used to satirize the disconnect between Big Tech billionaires and the general public, turning a formal academic milestone into a viral commentary on modern tech culture.