The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative makes its first investment

I suppose I can't help but admire the chutzpah of cloaking a tax deductible scheme to drive down your labor costs as a noble quest to "advance human potential".

Now where did I put my black and red flags...

This is incorrect. 99% of code is useless and should never have been written.

Doesn't it do both of those, plus also potentially open Facebook to being out-competed by a Nigerian or Kenyan software company?

Even if his particular brand of education is in the particular areas in which his company employs people (note that it is also his own personal area of education and expertise), I don't think that should be enough to dismiss funding education as a valid tax deductible charity. Now, if in the next months it emerges that this coding schools teach only FB specific technologies (e.g. something like how to build a Messenger bot, I don't even mean PHP/Hack or React) or that admission is contingent in signing a contract to work for FB afterwards, I would feel very differently.

To put an extreme example, do you consider the companies listed here: http://www.blackgirlscode.com/partners.html to also be participating in a tax deductible anti-labor scheme? If not, where is the line?

Sure, maybe at some point Zuckerberg will realize, like Gates did before him, that the world still needs more anti-malaria drugs and nets, before it needs computers and programming courses. Nonetheless, education initiatives (even highly-targeted professional-skill education initiatives) are charities and do produce a public benefit. Whether or not that benefit exceeds the benefit produced by the taxes that would otherwise have been collected leads to a lengthy policy discussion about when and how to tax charitable donations, which might indeed be an option.

Huh? Would you rather see less educational opportunities for African citizens?

Whether you believe he is doing a good thing because it's a good thing, or just because he wants to be seen doing a good thing, it doesn't change the fact that the good thing is being done.

Tax deductibility does indeed incentivise charitable giving, possibly for selfish reasons. But the person on the recieving end of education/healthcare/whatever, doesn't really care do they? The effect is what's important, not the motivation.