As Facebook Hits Half-A-Billion, Aaron Sorkin Dramatizes FB Founding

by Bruce Friedrich

Facebook is just six years old (you might want to read that again), and it’s about to pass the 500 million member mark, reports Cecilia Kang in the Washington Post.

The news comes a few months before Aaron Sorkin’s latest endeavor is due to grace movie screens nationwide. Called “The Social Network” and based on The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, the film dramatizes the events surrounding the site’s founding at Harvard University by tech wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg just six years ago.

My wife and I have been watching decade-old re-runs of The West Wing, and we’ve been stunned by how similar Sorkin’s plotlines are to current events: We have a president whose right flank is excoriating him over anything and everything, a brilliant and powerful chief-of-staff political insider whose staff can’t seem to get traction for the president with the American people, a deeply Christian president under attack from fundamentalist Christians and blow-hard radio right wingers, Democrats who think the president is selling them out to try to work with Republicans (who, as noted, are not interested in working with him), a battle for national health care that doesn’t go as far as the progressive caucus would like (single payer), a military that doesn’t fully trust him (despite policies that are further right than left)—and on and on. The best scene, in my opinion, involves a DNC pollster excoriating campaign staffers for being unwilling to fight right wing fire with left wing fire, “I’m tired of working for candidates who make me think that I should be embarrassed to believe what I believe…”

I’m looking forward to seeing what the Master-of-Fast-Paced-Dialogue does with Facebook.

By: BruceGFriedrich

Vice President, Policy, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals