The Social Network
What is The Social Network about?
Is The Social Network a true story?
Did Mark Zuckerberg approve of The Social Network?
Was The Social Network a hit?
The Social Network fictionalizes the story of how Mark Zuckerberg founded the social media platform Facebook. Released in 2010, the film is less focused on historical accuracy and more on crafting a compelling narrative within the framework of a legal drama, inventing and reimagining characters and motivations as needed. It is widely considered one of the most accomplished films of the 21st century, driven by the up-tempo dialogue of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay and the slick visuals of David Fincher’s direction. Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires (2009), the movie won Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay, best original score, and best film editing.
Plot summary
The film intercuts scenes from Mark Zuckerberg’s time at Harvard University with depositions in two lawsuits filed against him that were linked to the creation of Facebook.
Mark (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is a prodigiously talented computer science major but lacks social skills. He is obsessed with the prestige that comes with getting into “final clubs,” exclusive social organizations for Harvard students that operate independently of the university. As he rambles about his chances of getting into one, he is dismissive of the suggestions of his girlfriend, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), and belittles her college and social circle, causing her to break up with him. In a drunken rage, he berates her in his blog and creates a website for ranking female college students by attractiveness. The site attracts enormous traffic from male students and disgust from female students. The Harvard administration eventually shuts it down, and Mark is put on academic probation for hacking into Harvard’s database to create the website and causing the university’s network to crash.
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Despite the infamy it brings Mark, the stunt impresses three fellow Harvard students, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella). They ask Mark to help them build a dating-oriented social media platform called HarvardConnection—exclusive to Harvard students—positioning it as a way to mend his reputation. Mark agrees but decides to appropriate the basic idea to design his own social media site instead, with the broader ambition of recreating the social experience of college online. While he leads the Winklevoss twins and Divya to believe he is working on their project, he relates his idea to his friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), a business major from a wealthy family. Mark offers Eduardo the role of chief financial officer and a 30 percent stake in his social media site in exchange for seed money to cover initial costs, and Eduardo agrees.
Mark tirelessly writes code for his website, which he eventually launches as TheFacebook, initially accessible only within Harvard. The Winklevoss twins and Divya are livid when they find out and contact their lawyer to send Mark a cease and desist letter claiming he had stolen their idea. Meanwhile, the new site is a runaway hit, and Mark becomes the most talked-about person on campus. When Eduardo confronts him about the legal notice, he brushes it off, saying he had not used any code from HarvardConnection.
Despite his ascendant social standing, Mark fails to make amends with Erica, who makes it clear that she has not forgiven him for blogging about her.
While the Winklevoss twins and Divya try in vain to persuade the Harvard administration to take action against Mark, he and Eduardo decide to expand the website to other schools in the United States, including Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. The site’s unprecedented success prompts Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), cofounder of the controversial music file-sharing site Napster, to meet with TheFacebook’s founders. Parker’s flamboyant charm and provocative ideas win over Mark but not Eduardo. Parker persuades Mark to move to Silicon Valley, California, and change the platform’s name to Facebook.
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With Mark set on moving to California with a team of developers, Eduardo equips him with funds to cover the expenses, though Eduardo stresses that the question of monetization remains unanswered. In California, Mark runs into Parker, who becomes part of the Facebook team and a mentor to Mark, helping Facebook expand beyond the United States. Parker also arranges a meeting with entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel (Wallace Langham) to discuss a possible investment in the company. Eduardo feels slighted about having been sidelined in business dealings and lashes out by temporarily freezing the company’s accounts, which jeopardizes a $500,000 deal with Thiel and angers Mark. The deal ultimately goes through, and Mark seems to let Eduardo’s indiscretion slide. However, Eduardo subsequently realizes that Mark had reduced his shareholding in the company to a vanishingly small fraction, leading to a climactic confrontation in which he threatens to sue Mark for control over the entire company. Later, at a party celebrating Facebook hitting one million users, Parker is arrested for being in possession of cocaine.
At the end of the depositions brought by Eduardo and by the Winklevoss twins and Divya, a junior legal counsel (Rashida Jones) informally tells Mark that he would be better off settling the lawsuits against him instead of taking them to trial, because a jury would likely find him abrasive and therefore be unlikely to give him a favorable verdict. After she leaves, Mark looks up Erica’s Facebook profile and sends her a friend request, refreshing the page over and over in the hopes that she will accept it.
Production and reception
“The invention [of Facebook] itself is as modern as it gets, but the story is as old as storytelling; the themes of friendship, loyalty, jealousy, class, and power. This is [a] story that Aeschylus would have written or Shakespeare or Paddy Chayefsky. Luckily for me, none of those guys were available, so I got to do it.” —Aaron Sorkin, in a 2010 interview with the Writers Guild of America, West
Sorkin agreed to write the screenplay for Sony Pictures in about 2008 after reading the first few pages of Mezrich’s 14-page book proposal for The Accidental Billionaires. Sorkin has said he started writing immediately, researching independently using public information and talking to people with close ties to Facebook. Though he touched base with Mezrich a few times to exchange notes, Sorkin has said that by the time he read the whole book, he had written roughly 80 percent of the script. Whereas Mezrich’s book relies heavily on Saverin’s recollections and reconciles conflicting viewpoints into a single probable narrative, Sorkin was keen on presenting three competing versions of the truth without resolving them. Fincher was brought on to direct the project in 2009. Notably, neither Zuckerberg nor Facebook was officially involved in the film’s development.
The film received an overwhelmingly positive response from critics and audiences. Sorkin and Fincher were especially praised for the film’s energetic pacing and riveting drama. The movie was commercially successful, raking in about $225 million at the global box office. Zuckerberg himself was less enthused by the film, saying it inaccurately centered his motivations for creating Facebook on the desire for social and romantic success. For his part, Sorkin has been clear about liberally whisking in fictional elements and motivations. He said in a 2010 interview with New York magazine, “This isn’t a documentary. Art isn’t about what happened, and the properties of people and the properties of ‘characters’ are two completely different things.”
Sorkin wrote and directed The Social Reckoning—a companion film to The Social Network rather than a full-blown sequel—in 2026. Jeremy Strong took on the role of a somewhat older Mark Zuckerberg, who comes under fire after a whistleblower exposes internal practices at Facebook that may have caused real-world harm. The story was based on “The Facebook Files,” an explosive 2021 investigation into the company (renamed Meta in October 2021) by The Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White in the film.