Aaron Sorkin says Facebook has gotten “way out of hand” and evolved into a social media monster that doesn’t reflect what co-founder Mark Zuckerberg originally intended.
The writer and director of the upcoming film The Social Reckoning — the sequel to the 2010 hit The Social Network — tells Esquire in a new interview that the social media platform has become dangerous given how many of its billions of global users get their news from the platform.
“I don’t want to get the stat wrong, but it’s about a third of American adults get their news from Facebook,” Sorkin said (Pew’s latest research puts the number even higher, at 38 percent). “That is very dangerous. We’re no longer agreeing that the sky is blue and two plus two equals four.”
Continued Sorkin: “And by the way, let me be clear: I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg ever intended for it to have a corrosive effect. I think his intentions were good. He was somebody who, like a lot of people, had difficulty fitting into the social structure of college life and probably high school. He invented his own social structure, and he got to be the mayor of it and couldn’t be excluded from it. His brilliance is undeniable, and that was a cool thing and it got way out of hand. It’s gone completely out of control.”
Sorkin has previously declared, “I blame Facebook for January 6,” and was asked about that connection in the new interview and whether it’s part of the film.
“What definitely is part of the movie is what Facebook did in 2018. They were in trouble. Engagement was going down, there was competition from TikTok, and they had to do something. So they retuned the algorithm … they knew that the things that get reshared the most are rage bait. So they began pumping into the air supply all this stuff intended to make you mad. Certainly, you can draw a line from that to January 6.”
Based on true events, the new film centers on a young Facebook engineer named Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) who teams up with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) on a risky mission to bring attention to the social network’s biggest secrets. Jeremy Strong takes over the role of Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, who played the role in the first film.
The 65-year-old screenwriter was also asked about his stroke, from which he thankfully says he’s managed “to recover 100 percent.”
“I had been not living a very healthy life,” he said. “I wasn’t exercising enough. I was still eating the way I ate in college. I was smoking a lot. So I decided not to do that anymore. And it wasn’t even because I felt bad. It was because I saw the look in my daughter’s face. I scared the hell out of her, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.”
Sony Pictures is set to release The Social Reckoning in theaters Oct. 9.
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