David Fincher’s The Social Network chronicles the creation of Facebook and the many troubles between its creators and investors, and while it got many things right, it also took some creative liberties. Two years after directing the fantasy drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher returned in 2010 with a different type of drama film in The Social Network, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich.
The Social Network portrayed the founding of the famous social networking website 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 that founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) came across in the process. The Social Network was very well received by critics and has been named one of the best films of the decade, but it isn’t an entirely accurate portrayal of how Facebook was created.
11 The Accusations Of Animal Cruelty Against Eduardo
The Real Eduardo Was Not Involved In The Controversy
One of the most unexpected subplots in The Social Network that continues to come up revolves around Eduardo Saverin’s initiation into one of Harvard’s prestigious clubs. As part of the grueling process that Eduardo undergoes to get into the Phoenix Club, he is tasked with looking after a live chicken. However, The Harvard Crimson published a story that alleges he fed the chicken poultry meat which was seen as forced cannibalism and a sign of animal cruelty.
The controversy comes up again many times throughout the movie as another wedge that divides Mark and Eduardo, with Mark feeling the controversy could hurt the business and Eduardo beginning to suspect that Mark leaked the story because he was jealous of Eduardo getting into the club. There was indeed a story printed in 2003 that called into question the Phoenix Club’s treatment of chickens, but it made no mention of cannibalism and did not involve Eduardo Saverin at all (via The Harvard Crimson).
10 The Winklevosses’ Increased Presence
The Twins May Not Have Played As Big Of A Role In Facebook’s History
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are a huge part of the movie and are presented as key antagonists to The Social Network‘s protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg. The twins are shown to be incredibly ambitious young men in their own right who recruit Mark to help them with their idea for a social networking platform. The movie then questions whether Mark stole the idea from the Winklevosses and turned around to make Facebook, perhaps partially out of jealousy that they were accomplished rowers.
While, it is true that the Winklevosses did eventually sue Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea, a case that was settled out of court, many of the people involved with Facebook suggest that they were not as big a part of the story as the movie suggests. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is a character in the movie with a much smaller presence than the Winklevosses and the movie suggests the twins were not as involved as they insinuate, revealing that he never met them (via Vulture):
[It] is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter(like the Winklevosses, who I’ve still never even met and had no part in the work we did to create the site over the past 6 years.
9 The Relationship Between Mark And The Winklevosses
Divya Narendra Wasn’t Pushing For The Lawsuit Either
The antagonistic relationship between the Winklevosses and Mark Zuckerberg actually begins as a business partnership. Following Mark’s infamous FaceMash site becoming so popular that it crashed the Harvard server, the Winklevosses are shown to take an interest in him and they recruit him for their HarvardConnection idea which they had built alongside Divya Narendra. When Narendra discovers that Mark has built TheFacebook in competition with their idea, he pushes for them to take legal action.
The Social Network builds this relationship as a central part of the movie, but it happened differently in reality. Zuckerberg was not recruited by the Winklevosses because of FaceMash. Instead, when another member of the HarvardConnection team dropped out, he recommended Zuckerberg as a replacement. Also, while Narendra was seen as the driving force of the action against Zuckerberg, he had largely moved on from the idea by the time the Winklevosses sought to file the lawsuit.
8 The Antagonistic Relationship Between Eduardo Saverin And Sean Parker
Parker Considers Saverin A Friend
One of the most intense relationships in The Social Network is the one between Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker. From the moment they meet in the movie, they do not like each other and quickly turn into enemies. Eduardo makes it his mission to convince Mark and everyone else that Sean is not an important part of the company, while Sean is looking to get Eduardo kicked out of the company and replace him.
The relationship builds the climactic confrontation with the memorable moment in which Eduardo makes Sean flinch by pretending he is going to hit him and delivers the withering insult, “I like standing next to you, Sean. It makes me look so tough.” However, the real Sean Parker insists that there is no bad blood between the two. In an interview, he called the movie a work of fiction while also speaking directly about how his relationship with Saverin was depicted, revealing they are even friendly to this day (via Mashable):
“The part of the movie that frustrated me is actually the scene at the end where the character played by Justin Timberlake — who happens to have my name — basically writes a check to Eduardo – who I’m also, I consider Eduardo a friend of mine, and I’m one of the few people at Facebook who still interacts with Eduardo – and throws it in his face and has security escort him out of the building. And I mean, that’s just rude. This guy in the movie is a morally reprehensible human being.”
7 The Party Atmosphere Of The Company’s Early Days
The Movie Glamorized Fabebook’s Beginnings
Another quality that The Social Network suggests Sean Parker brings to Facebook early on is the party atmosphere. While Eduardo Saverin is shown to be working hard in New York City, Mark Zuckerberg and the others are shown to have built a party house in Palo Alto where they spend their days drinking and ziplining into the pool.
Part of this reputation might come from the fact that Zuckerberg was in fact drunk when he was coding the FaceMash site. However, it seems as though this depiction was largely inaccurate and the reality of the business in its infancy was a lot less glamorous. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz insists those early days were filled with hard work and he jokes that the movie’s version of what happened was a lot more preferable (via Vulture):
A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.
6 Mark Zuckerberg’s Reason To Create Facebook
Zuckerberg Created Facebook To Connect University Students, Not “Get Girls”
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 on his LiveJournal blog and then proceeds to create a campus website called FaceMash. The site is a “hot or not” comparison of female students and draws a lot of attention in just a couple of hours. After that, Zuckerberg went on to create TheFacebook, and the film tells that one of his goals with this new website was to “get girls.”
In reality, Zuckerberg’s motivations for creating Facebook were entirely different. While he did create FaceMash and the site was taken down by the Harvard administration, with Zuckerberg facing expulsion, along with charges of breach of security and violating individual privacy (via The Harvard Crimson), his intention to create a bigger site was so that people around the university could connect. In addition to that, Zuckerberg said in a Q&A session that he didn’t create Facebook to “get girls,” but because he enjoyed “building things.”
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 (via Business Insider). The problems between the Winklevosses and Zuckerberg were way more complicated than the film showed, and the lawsuit was eventually settled in 2008.
5 Mark Zuckerberg’s Future Wife
Zuckerberg Met His Wife Around The Beginning Of The Story
While The Social Network does present the idea that Mark wants to get girls, it also makes it clear that there is one girl that remains on his mind throughout the years. The opening scene of The Social Network features the breakup between Mark and Erica Albright, and while he lashes out to her online, he seems to see her as the one he let slip away. He attempts to apologize to her for his cruelty and the movie ends with him sending her a “friend request” on Facebook and obsessively refreshing the page to see if she accepts.
However, the idea that Erica Albright is the woman Mark could not get over comes off as disingenuous in many ways since Mark Zuckerberg met his future wife around the same time as this breakup would have happened. The movie begins in 2003 which is the same year Zuckerberg began dating Priscilla Chan with the two marrying in 2012. While it is understandable that The Social Network doesn’t include Chan as a character, making Eisenberg’s Mark fixated on another woman feels false.
4 Eduardo Saverin’s Role In The Creation Of Facebook
Saverin Wasn’t The Victim As Portrayed In The Social Network.
The Social Network focused on portraying Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) as the real victim in the creation of Facebook. 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 (Justin Timberlake) through a fellow student, marking 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, Zuckerberg met Saverin and they agreed to invest $1000 on 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. Saverin failed at all of these and began to run unauthorized ads on Facebook that weren’t even for the site’s benefit, as they were for a startup Saverin was running on his own (via Business Insider).
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’s family loans. Saverin was eventually fired, though the diluting of his shares did happen as a way to get him out of the company.
3 Sean Parker’s Involvement In Creating Facebook
Parker Did More Good Than Harm To Facebook.
What Eduardo Saverin failed to do, Sean Parker was able to achieve. 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 Parker 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.
First off, Parker discovered the website on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend and emailed Zuckerberg suggesting that they met (via Vanity Fair). Parker then flew to New York to meet Zuckerberg, though it might have not gone as the film showed. Parker and Zuckerberg didn’t start working together right away, and 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, where 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 incident and pressured him into resigning as company president, which he ended up doing, though he continued to be involved with Facebook’s growth and met regularly with Zuckerberg.
2 Erica Albright Isn’t A Real Person
Rooney Mara’s Character Doesn’t Exist, But She Was Based On Someone Else
Erica Albright is seen as a sort of “villain” in The Social Network as she dumps Zuckerberg at the beginning of the movie, which then prompts him to write an offensive blog entry. In the above-mentioned Q&A session, Zuckerberg said that Erica Albright doesn’t exist, but admitted that he was dumped.
In Zuckerberg’s real blog entry, he insulted a woman named Jessica Alona, but Aaron Sorkin explained (via GrouchoReviews) that he changed her name in order to not draw attention to her. However, the real Jessica Alona hasn’t come forward to share her side of the story, so that’s one part of Facebook’s history that remains unknown.
1 How Mark Zuckerberg Reacted To The Social Network
Zuckerberg Has Spoken About The Inaccuracies In The Social Network
Unsurprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to the film wasn’t as good and welcoming as that of critics. Zuckerberg said in 2010 (via Oprah) that all the partying was fiction as he spent years working hard and coding Facebook. Zuckerberg’s obsession with Harvard’s clubs and reaching a certain social status are also not true, with Zuckerberg saying in the above-mentioned Q&A session 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 that same event, 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, Zuckerberg has admitted that The Social Network did get some details right, such as the design of the office and his clothes. 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 of 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.
Sources: The Crimson, Business Insider, Vanity Fair, Groucho Reviews, Oprah.
