News Feed: Andrew Parker is writing about Facebook.

Today I commented on The Social Network.

The Social Network tells some of the stories about Mark Zuckerberg and his creation of Facebook. Today Facebook has over 500 million users, with people spending over 700 billion minutes per month on the site; feats that have made Zuckerberg the world’s youngest billionaire. But, as the movie tagline says, he didn’t accomplish all of this without making a few enemies.



The Social Network's poster

In an interview on The Colbert Report, Aaron Sorkin, the film’s writer, says that the film is fact, but he included 3 different versions of the story in the movie. As Facebook’s beginnings led quickly to court cases and legal action between the creators, there is debate over which version that came out of the litigation is correct. Sorkin also said in that interview,“We don’t know what the answer is. It’s also more fun because the audience gets to decide who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s good, who’s bad- we just want to start fights in the parking lot.” (watch The Colbert Report episode here)

Aaron Sorkin

But in any of these stories, it’s almost impossible not to notice that as Stephen Colbert put it, Sorkin portrays Zuckerberg as “something of a genius-jerk.” Zuckerberg’s motives and ethics in leading on his partners in a strikingly similar idea for a project are called into question during the court hearings, as evidence is presented that Zuckerberg dodged contact with them and even misled them while simultaneously developing his own take on a social networking site. Even though, as the Zuckerberg character says in the movie, he made it better than them, I still couldn’t help feeling like that original idea was stolen from his partners. But what made me think poorly of Zuckerberg the most was how he treated his former best friend and CFO, Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg is not portrayed as having many friends in college, yet he turns his back on the guy who believed in him and supported him from the beginning. Without the cash Saverin put up to fund the project, Facebook would never have happened. Beyond accusations of intellectual property theft, I was disgusted more by the idea that Zuckerberg, while pulling in more money than he knew what to do with, couldn’t repay his best friend for all he had done.

Although as I left the theater I felt guilty for supporting Facebook, I don’t think this movie will hurt Facebook’s popularity. Current users are too far immersed in their online social activities to delete their account based on events that happened 10 years ago, and I’m sure many people will be impressed by Zuckerberg as a young entrepreneur and check out his work. However, I think that most people who are not already on Facebook will now be even less likely to join, using this tale of questionable origins as another reason against supporting such a company and its founder.

Zuckerberg’s actions in response to the film have also been called in question. Although he has dismissed the movie in a few ways, by saying that it’s a fun, overly-dramatic look at years that were just hard work, and saying that the movie’s audience is too numerically insignificant in comparison to Facebook’s fan base to have any impact. (Taken from PR Post- Zuckerberg, Hearst and Hollywood: PR Lessons Learned From the Past, by Tiffany Gallicano.) I find this believable, but Zuckerberg also happened to donate $100 million in Facebook shares to the Newark school system on the movie’s release date, a timing he claims to be coincidental. This, as Gallicano goes on to say, is unbelievable. True or not, Zuckerberg’s “philanthropy” on the very day that this story comes out makes him look like he’s only trying to protect his reputation.

If the movie was as fun and insignificant as he said, Zuckerberg’s actions were unnecessary, and only make me think that there must be some truth to the movie’s inferences. It seems like a cover-up, and to me, only casts more shadow on Zuckerberg’s dealings. As Gallicano quotes, to say that the timing of this donation was coincidental only insults Zuckerberg’s audience, and I’m sure many will be skeptical.

Mark Zuckerberg on Oprah, where he made his donation annoucement

Give money to charity, great; support school systems. I think it’s absolutely expected of people as rich as Zuckerberg to be giving back, but don’t wait until you look bad to do it! Had Zuckerberg already setup a charity and been donating regularly, it would have been a lot easier for him to simply point to his ongoing positive actions, and they would be viewed as genuine philanthropy, not self-serving penance.