Sorkin Plans 'Social Network' Sequel Blaming Facebook for J6

6:00 PM · April 26, 2024

Excerpt Hollywood Reporter hollywoodreporter.com

The Oscar-winning screenwriter broke the news when he was asked during a live-from-D.C. edition of The Town podcast about how Facebook and social media have influenced democracy in the years since his 2010 hit.

“Look, yeah, I’ll be writing about this,” Sorkin told Matthew Belloni and Peter Hamby. “I blame Facebook for January 6.”

When asked why he blames a social media company for a pro-Donald Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol, Sorkin replied, “You’re going to need to buy a movie ticket.”

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Author Commentary

Ed Morrissey Apr 26, 2024 6:00 PM ET

Sounds like par for the course for Sorkin. While The Social Network is a very entertaining and witty film, it essentially got most of the Facebook story wrong. That's especially true in how Sorkin made Eduardo Saverin a victim, as Screen Rant noted last year:

Six months after the site launched, Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz (another Facebook co-founder) moved to Palo Alto to work on the site, while Saverin went to New York for an internship. Before they moved to different places, Zuckerberg asked Saverin to work on three essential things: setting up the company, getting funding, and making a business model. Saverin failed at all those things and began to run unauthorized ads on Facebook that weren’t even for the site’s benefit, as they were for a startup Saverin was running on his own (via Business Insider).
After that, Facebook was in need of money to keep running, and even though it had various investors lining up, Zuckerberg needed Saverin to sign off on the reformation of Facebook as a company under Delaware law, otherwise, no deals could be completed. Saverin was unreachable at that point, and the site had to live off of Zuckerberg's family loans.

Sorkin wanted to tell a fictional story for his own purposes in the original. I'd expect no less of a sequel.