Mr. Sorkin and Mr. Fincher took a few liberties with the facts. But “The Social Network” was based on real events, many of them chronicled in “The Accidental Billionaires,” a 2009 book by the journalist Ben Mezrich. And the film’s portrayal of the budding tech magnate as someone more interested in growing his creation than in who might be hurt by it has stood the test of time.
Watching this origin story unfold from stadium seating eight years ago, I thought I was seeing a series of hard lessons learned as a callow 19-year-old came of age. Streaming it in 2018, I saw something else: the beginning of a pattern that has become all too familiar.
It goes like this. Something bad happens of increasingly severe consequence on Facebook (say, Russian election meddling in the United States, or the incitement of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar). After it is called out, Mr. Zuckerberg or another company official vows to do better. And when the heat is off, the cycle begins anew.
The pattern repeated last week when a meticulously reported New York Times investigation revealed Facebook’s bare-knuckled efforts to deflect blame and undermine critics as it came under scrutiny for enabling the spread of misinformation in the run-up to the 2016 election.
Facebook, which had no comment on Sunday, has responded defensively.
“The reality of running a company of more than 10,000 people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on Thursday, “is that you’re not going to know everything that’s going on.”
It was a baffling explanation for anyone who took him and his deputy, Sheryl Sandberg, at face value when they swore, not long ago, that they would work openly to assert more control over the platform to stop misinformation campaigns, privacy breaches and incitements to violence.
Nothing was more at variance with their promises of transparency than The Times’s revelation that the company had hired Definers Public Affairs, whose founders are known in Republican circles as lords of the so-called “dark arts” of political opposition research.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/business/media/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-movie-the-social-network.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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