Aaron Sorkin Takes Shots at Facebook and Gives Mark Zuckerberg a Pass

I FaceTime my parents about once or twice a week while my kids are eating dinner. It gives them a chance to see their grandkids with some kind of regularity without me having to drive three and a half hours to Massachusetts. But eventually the kids get bored or distracted by their food, and the conversation between my parents and me inevitably turns to politics. They’re liberal, so it’s mostly fine, but they mostly get their news from two places: CNN and Facebook.

To that end, during a recent conversation, my mother said something that truly surprised me: “I thought Trump cancelled 60 Minutes?” If she had just been conflating and confusing a bunch of headlines, I would have understood. The President’s meddling with 60 Minutes has caused a lot of commotion. I know because I’ve covered it several times for this site. But when I assured her that hadn’t happened, she pushed back and tried to figure out where she saw it. The answer? Facebook.

This wasn’t the first time that she was tricked by something she saw on the site, but this was beyond some fake quote about Republicans attributed to Norman Rockwell. This was a real story, happening now, that she was genuinely misinformed about. But that’s the game. Facebook is a misinformation machine, and Arron Sorkin ain’t too happy about it. In fact, it looks like that will be a big part of his press tour for The Social Reckoning, a sequel to The Social Network.

While speaking with THR, Sorkin lamented how adults like my mother use Facebook. “I don’t want to get the stat wrong, but it’s about a third of American adults get their news from Facebook,” Sorkin explained, with THR noting that the stat is even higher, around 38 percent. “That is very dangerous. We’re no longer agreeing that the sky is blue and two plus two equals four.” He’s right! Facebook is full of nonsense that people pretend is fact. But Sorkin stopped short of condemning the site’s creator.

“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,” Sorkin noted. “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.” And who let it get out of control, Aaron?!

Taking the argument back to Facebook’s origins feels intended to excuse how his own film likely added to Zuckerberg’s celebrity, which the social media mogul has used to post bizarre videos letting everyone know that they will be replaced by AI. The man still doesn’t fit in socially, nor does he want to, and that has allowed him to treat Facebook users like they aren’t people. This idea that it just “got way out of hand,” as if no one could stop it, is assinine.

Sorkin goes on to blame January 6th on Facebook, and talks about the company like it’s a human being. It’s not, but it’s run by a very terrible human being, and he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.