The Social Network True Story: Everything The Facebook Movie Got Wrong

David Fincher’s The Social Network told the story of how Facebook was created, but even though it sells itself as a biographical film, Aaron Sorkin took many liberties when writing the script and made some major changes to real-life people and their roles in creating the popular social network website. Two years after directing the fantasy drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher returned with a different type of drama film with The Social Network, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich.

SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY

The Social Network portrayed the founding of Facebook and the lawsuits that followed, offering a look at how the concept for the website came to be, what it took to get it up and running, and the obstacles founder Mark Zuckerberg came across with in the process. The film starred Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield as co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as former Facebook president (and Napster co-founder) Sean Parker, and Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who sued Zuckerberg for stealing their idea.

Related: The Social Network Predicted The 2010s

The Social Network was very well received by critics, who praised its direction, acting, editing, and score, and has been named as one of the best films of the decade. While the story told in The Social Network is charged with drama, it isn’t an accurate portrayal of how Facebook was created – for starters, the source material can’t be taken as fully accurate (more on that later), and Sorkin has admitted to changing many details to better fit the tone he was looking for. Here’s everything The Social Network got wrong.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Reason To Create Facebook

The Social Network begins with then 19 year-old Mark Zuckerberg being dumped by his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). Back at his college dorm, Zuckerberg writes an insulting entry about his now ex-girlfriend on his LiveJournal blog, and then proceeds to create a campus website called Facemash. The site was a “hot or not” comparison of female students, and drew a lot of attention in just a couple of hours. After that, Zuckerberg goes on to create Thefacebook, and the film tells that one of his goals with this new website was to “get girls”. In short, he was driven by resentment and revenge for being dumped, when in reality, Zuckerberg’s motivations were completely different.

While he did create Facemash and the site was taken down by the Harvard administration (and Zuckerberg faced expulsion, along with being charged with breach of security and violating individual privacy), his intention to create a bigger site was so that people around the university could connect, and then the concept was obviously expanded so people from different parts of the world could connect. In addition to that, Zuckerberg has explicitly said he didn’t create Facebook to “get girls”, but because he enjoyed “building things”. Of course, that would have been too boring for Hollywood’s standards.

Just a few days after Thefacebook was launched, Divya Narendra, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build their own social network called HarvardConnection, but instead stalled the project to use their idea on Thefacebook. The problems between the Winklevosses and Zuckerberg were way more complicated than the film showed, and the lawsuit was eventually settled in 2008 – and the Winklevosses’ site, ConnectU, is no longer active.

Related: How To Delete Your Facebook Account (Properly)

Eduardo Saverin’s Role

The Social Network focused on portraying Eduardo Saverin as the real victim in the creation of Facebook, which is not surprising as he was a consultant on the book Sorkin based the story on. In the film, Saverin is a friend of Zuckerberg who is asked to help him fund TheFacebook. Saverin and Zuckerberg are later introduced to Sean Parker through a fellow student called Christy Lee, which marks the beginning of all problems for Saverin. The company then moves to Palo Alto at Parker’s suggestion and Saverin stays in New York to work on business development. Saverin isn’t on board with Parker making business decisions, and freezes the company’s bank account. Saverin’s discomfort and frustration with Facebook, Zuckerberg, and Parker only grows after learning that the investment deal with Peter Thiel diluted his share. Saverin’s name is later removed from the masthead as co-founder, and he sues Zuckerberg. In reality, it all happened very differently.

Zuckerberg met Saverin and they agreed to invest $1000 in the site, which went towards the servers needed to host Thefacebook. Zuckerberg chose Saverin because he knew he had enough money to do it. 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. Not only did he fail at all those things, but the final straw was that Saverin began to run unauthorized ads on Facebook that weren’t even for the site’s benefit: those ads were for a startup Saverin was running on his own.

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 family loans. Saverin was eventually fired, though the diluting of his shares did happen as a way to get him out of the company.

Sean Parker and Facebook

What Eduardo Saverin failed to do, Sean Parker was able to achieve. As mentioned above, in The Social Network, Saverin and Zuckerberg meet Sean Parker through a fellow student, but not before Parker discovers Thefacebook after a one-night-stand. At the meeting, he presents a “billion-dollar” vision for the company, which impresses Zuckerberg, prompting him to move to Palo Alto. The film also portrays him as an antagonist, as Saverin doesn’t agree with him making business decisions, but in reality, Parker’s actions when working at Facebook were for the company’s benefit.

Related: Can Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Be Saved?

First off, Parker discovered the website on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend, and sent an email to Zuckerberg suggesting that they met. Parker then flew to New York to meet Zuckerberg, though it might have not gone as the film showed. They didn’t start working together right away as in the film – they ran into each other months after that first meeting on the streets of Palo Alto. Parker was unemployed and Zuckerberg invited him to move into Facebook’s house. Parker’s main task was to get money for the site, something he was familiar with as he raised money for Napster and knew his way around Silicon Valley. Parker eventually replaced Saverin and became president of the company.

Parker’s time at Facebook came to an end in 2005. During a kiteboarding trip to North Carolina, Parker was arrested on suspicion of drug possession, but wasn’t charged. Still, Facebook investors weren’t happy with that, and pressured him into resigning as company president, which he ended up doing. Still, he continued to be involved with Facebook’s growth and met regularly with Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Reaction To The Social Network

Unsurprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to the film wasn’t as good and welcoming as that of critics. He has said many times how inaccurate the film is, saying all the partying was fiction as he spent years working hard and coding Facebook, so there wasn’t really time for all that. His obsession with Harvard’s clubs and reaching a certain social status are also not true, with Zuckerberg saying that it’s all “a big disconnect from the way people who make movies think about what we do in Silicon Valley – building stuff”. In a Q&A session, Zuckerberg even said that the film “made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful”, and that the story had to be embellished as writing code, building a product, and building a company is “not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about”.

However, he has pointed out that The Social Network did get some details correct, such as the design of the office and his clothes, which was weird to him as the team behind the film paid so much attention to things like that but not to the actual events. In the end, The Social Network, while under the category of “biographical film”, doesn’t really intend to be an accurate portrayal of the history of Facebook’s creation and Zuckerberg’s rise, but an examination on entrepreneurship, social media, and the business world, which is definitely a complex one – and one where everyone will have their own version of what truly happened.

Next: The Best Movie Endings Of The Decade