Aaron Sorkin Is Writing a January 6th Movie

By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 26, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 26, 2024 |

This week on The Ringer’s The Town podcast with Matthew Belloni, Aaron Sorkin was interviewed. On the podcast, he spoke about AI (doesn’t see it as a threat yet), why journalists largely rejected The Newsroom, and why he turned down the adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk novel (there was too much about the work that Musk does that Sorkin didn’t understand).

But he also broke some news, revealing to Belloni et al. that he’s working on a new script. It came in the context of a discussion about how Sorkin believes the news media is doing a better job of covering him in 2024 than in 2016 and 2020. Specifically, that the legit news organizations are not covering every move he makes, that they are fact-checking him, and that at least CNN will push back against election deniers.

Asked about the role that Facebook plays in creating news echo chambers, the screenwriter of The Social Network revealed that he blames Facebook for January 6th, and if we want to know why he believes that, we’ll need “to buy a movie ticket.” In other words, as he confirmed, he’s writing a January 6th movie, one which blames Facebook for the attempted coup.

“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible because that is what will increase engagement. That is what will get you to what they call on the inside of Facebook the ‘infinite scroll.’”

Sorkin directly blamed Mark Zuckerberg for that: “There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth. If Mark Zuckerberg woke up tomorrow morning and realized that there is nothing you can buy for $120 billion that you can’t buy for $119 billion, so how about if I make a little less money and tune up integrity and tune down growth?”

Sorkin would neither confirm nor deny that the project is a sequel to The Social Network, saying that he had said enough and wanted to cut his publicist a break.

Source: The Ringer’s The Town podcast with Matthew Belloni