Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: The Social Network 'Made Stuff Up' and was 'Hurtful'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that ‘The Social Network’, David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin’s biopic which supposedly detailed how the site was born, ‘made stuff up’ and was ‘hurtful’.

The 2010 film, which won three Oscars, was adapted from the book ‘The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal’ by writer Ben Mezrich.

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It saw Jesse Eisenberg play the former Harvard graduate as he tussled with creating the site and a lawsuit filed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who claimed he had stolen their idea.

But Zuckerberg is clearly still a little sore about some of the embellishments that were made to increase the drama.

“The reality is that writing code and building a product and then building a company actually is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about,” he told an audience at Facebook’s first public Q&A session.

“If they were really making a movie [of my life], it would have been of me sitting at a computer, coding for two hours straight, which probably would have not been that good of a movie.”

While he said that the filmmakers went to great pains to get smaller details right, like the layout of the firm’s offices, he claims other matters of plot were far less accurate.

“They just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful,” he said.

Of most upset to the billionaire developer, was the inference that he created the site to help him meet girls, when he was actually already dating his now wife, Priscilla Chan, at the time.

Aaron Sorkin, who is also responsible for TV shows like ‘The West Wing’ and films like ‘A Few Good Men’ and ‘Moneyball’, has admitted that representing the creation of Facebook faithfully was not a top priority when writing the screenplay.

“I don’t want my fidelity to be the truth; I want it to be storytelling,” he told New York magazine.

“What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?”

Similarly, producer Scott Rudin also implied as much, and on picking up the Golden Globe for Best Picture in 2011 thanked Zuckerberg and his company ‘for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other’.

Sorkin said over the weekend that as his latest TV series ‘The Newsroom’ enters its third an final series, he’s ‘pretty certain’ that he’s quitting TV writing altogether.

He’s currently finishing the Steve Jobs biopic set to be directed by Danny Boyle.

Image credits: Getty/Columbia/Reuters

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