Aaron Sorkin's ego is out of control.

He really thought he was good enough to direct a sequel to a David Fincher movie. Or else he was SOOO in love with this film and its message, that he felt like he just HAD to make it, even though Fincher was disinterested or unavailable.

Just something to keep in mind.

Anyway, the movie jumps back and forth in time. The latter time is Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jeremy Strong, prepping for testimony before Congress, while his advisors try to make him come across as nice and non-threatening, and also try to conceal a breaking story from him, which it turns out, is a series of articles by the Wall Street Journal about how evil Facebook is. The earlier time is a couple years earlier when Jeff Horwitz, the author of the articles, played by Jeremy Allen White (the second, and inferior, collaboration of the two actors playing real people I have reviewed here) arrives in San Francisco to investigate Facebook for the WSJ. Completely tech illiterate, to the point of being unable to operate a GPS system in 2019, he begins researching and poking at the company, eventually getting a bite from a tech nerd named Frances Something. They dance back and forth, with Frances offering information about problems she perceives with the company, even though she says she believes in Facebook and is doing this to help it be better. Before she gets in touch with Horwitz, she spends a lot of time bothering other employees about her problems, but no one else shares her concerns, which is apparently a valid reason to violate a contract and commit crimes. Got that?

Also, she's an intelligent Aaron Sorkin character, which means she demonstrates this by pedantic nitpicking at imprecise figures of speech or exposing ignorance of trivia. That is how all Aaron Sorkin characters demonstrate their superior intelligence, except when he decides that faulty syllogisms or rhetorical fallacies will make a punchier scene: then his designated smart people do that. But also designated-intelligent Aaron Sorkin characters are not obliged to follow rules, because they are better than everyone. Frances knows the difference between Cassandra of Greek mythology and the Boy Who Cried Wolf, so she is better than the person who uses both as metaphors for her situation in the company. That the end result of both characters is that for different reasons, no one was going to listen to them even when they were right and this is actually a very apt comparison for a nerd trying to apply her personal ethics to a company that, according to this film, has a different ethical focus, escapes both our genius heroine AND our critically-acclaimed screenwriter.

This is my problem with Sorkin. He is a very talented writer, but the impression you get from his screenplays is that he holds several things as fundamental truths:
- Intelligence is the best thing ever, and it is a holistic concept. If you're the right kind of smart, it means you are right about everything, everywhere, even in areas not generally associated with intelligence, like morality.
- His side on every issue is the really smart one, and also the morally correct one
- Possession of skills he does not value (e.g. creating one of the most successful software products in history and building a billion-dollar company) does not constitute the special kind of Intelligence
- People with whom he disagrees are stupid, and this manifests in all ways, even ones that are not actually true.*

Sorkin is great at writing for most situations where he is not personally invested, but when the scene touches on an issue he cares about, when he decides to preach instead of tell a story, that's where all the above crap comes shining out. In "The West Wing" he frequently had characters use short-hand to discuss a topic, coyly hiding the subject and details from the viewers, in the name of realistic dialogue, because of course, colleagues who work closely together would not need to fully explain themselves to each other when discussing an issue with which they are both familiar. But when it's really important to Sorkin that he educate his audience, they will drop that convention like a hot potato and suddenly the snappy back-and-forth banter and conversational dialogue goes out the window and we get things like,
"As you know, in households with a female primary income earner, children are half as likely to commit violent crimes"
"That's because of LBJ's Household Child Care support program the Republicans said would never work."

or

"Damnit, some of the most brilliant sociology professors in the nation have proven that the only reason to oppose gun control is the desire to see more urban blacks to get shot!"
"That's right!"

*I recall during the 2000 Presidential Election, when Sorkin was currently the lead writer & producer of a show about a fictional White House staff, his opinions on the race where solicited by some, and he was angry and frustrated at Al Gore's stalling at releasing his college transcripts and putting an end, once and for all, to the debate about the candidates' relative intelligences. He really really seemed to think that HIS candidate was automatically going to be so unarguably superior, that he was acting like Al Gore was one of his put-upon protagonists, e.g. President Andrew Shepherd, humbly suffering the slings and arrows of his inferiors out of saintly modesty and commitment to a fair fight or some bullshit. It turned out Gore's grades were not markedly better than Bush's, he slithered into Harvard and graduated with honors despite some low grades in certain courses and his father being a sitting US Senator had nothing to do with any of that(this implication is my own tribute to Sorkin's writing).

**For example, Frances, at one point, frustrated with Horwitz's inability to follow her tech stuff, berates him, asking why he is so bad at math, and if it was because he went to a Baptist school (Sorkin's seething hatred and contempt for Christianity, or at least any sort of Christianity that has not modified itself to match the Democratic party platform, is another constant). In fact, whatever you think of their versions of science or sex ed or literary criticism, religious parochial schools are REALLY GOOD at teaching basic scholastic skills, like reading and math. I was never that good at, or interested in, math, but the skills I learned in a Catholic parish school put me in the upper levels of the general public, including a more mainstream Catholic high school. Incidentally, our math books were published by Beka, a Baptist company. You can tell they are Baptist, because in the lessons where they are teaching 4th graders to balance a checkbook, calculate a household budget and fill out an income tax form, the examples provided always included tithes or donations to "Faith Baptist Church".

Anyway.

I don't like Mark Zuckerberg. I don't use Facebook. I may have signed up for it once to try accessing groups of interest to me, but found it inaccessible and gave up. I think I have an Instagram account in order to see some of my siblings' or cousins' pictures once. I have accounts on Twitter & Tumblr, where my engagement is 90% fandom. And that's the extent of my social media activity and profile. But I am 100% on Zuckerberg's side, as a character in this movie. Like "Vice", by Adam McKay, a few years ago, I came into the movie, with high expectations from an artist, to learn some dirt on a loathsome public figure, and I came out of the movie with a better impression of the individual than I took in. I don't believe for a moment that either screen version is true, but are you telling me that THIS is the most a pair of highly competent filmmakers could do to demonize Dick Cheney & Mark Zuckerberg?

The evil thing Zuckerberg is doing in this movie, is refusing to censor, or as the movie says "fact-check", political ads. Bill Burr is playing "Charlie" a member of Zuckerberg's advice team, who is the only one brave enough to call him out and often provokes angry responses from Zuckerberg, and he is constantly needling Zuckerberg over not fact-checking political ads. When one of his teammates finally decides to defend Zuckerberg, who simply insists he is free-speech absolutist (which I do NOT believe, IRL) and refuses to engage, the toady cites how a lot of facts are subjective, suggesting that when someone cites economic growth they could be referring to all different sorts of metrics, so who is to say which one to use. Which is a very reasonable argument and Sorkin only pretends to answer it, by having Bill Burr start tapping away at his phone and then throwing it to the henchman before he's done talking. You are given the impression that he instantly called up an answer for how claim is to be fact-checked, without ever showing what the answer IS! The implication is that the objection and argument were specious, because Burr was able to so easily counter it (allegedly). The film does not offer an explanation as to why, if a white guy nearing 60 can instantly check these facts on his phone, Facebook needs to do it instead.

Meanwhile, as it turns out, the bug up Frances' butt is that it is possible to find people on Facebook who have beliefs that are different from those of which she approves. She claims her friend got radicalized from a progressive activist to an alt-right extremist who is so stupid that she thinks a video of her drunkenly baiting two cops on the side of the road and calling them DEI hires actually makes her look good and so she posts it online (again, it seems to fly right over the heads of France & Sorkin that this colossally stupid person was initially a progressive), and that Facebook's algorithm hooks you up with white supremacists through ordinary innocent activity, and every time she tried to bring up that people were being tempted with thoughtcrime, she was dismissed, because that feature seemed to be more popular, and got people to engage with Facebook, as opposed to censoring their posts and preventing them from finding what they wanted, which caused people to stop using Facebook. Basically, the contention is, every time there was a choice between making money, and indoctrinating people into moral and intelligent (for Sorkin values of those qualities) ideologies, Facebook chose to make money.

Frances also hears a family in a restaurant talking about their young daughter being cyber-bullied on Instagram, which Facebook owns, and the companies won't do anything, isn't that awful. When the child's father expresses violent desires about the people saying mean things to his kid, this is a totally legitimate and meaningful criticism, not at all like the dumbass executive who tried to compare Frances to Cassandra and the boy who cried wolf. By the way, did you know that NOT A SINGLE CAR COMPANY is doing ANYTHING to prevent people who drive their cars from hitting 12 year old motorists? Look, it's the culture! Parents HAVE to put their children behind the wheel, or they'll be disadvantaged! The real responsibility is on the car companies to put all kinds of limitations and restrictions on the operation of their vehicles so kids don't kill themselves, and adults can't crash into kids who steer into the fast lane!
Hey, you know who probably DOESN'T have a problem with their kids being "cyber-bullied"? Parents who send their kids to Baptist schools and actively monitor & moderate their internet use.

What the morons who are characters in, and producing, this movie fail to understand that they are showing is that People like Facebook the way it is, and will not use Facebook if it does what Anna wants. Facebook is POPULAR. It is not a public service. If it becomes UNpopular, no one will use it. They will find another online service to hook them up with the Klan, they will find other fora on which to socialize and in doing so, mock or insult other people to feel better about themselves. Sure, OnlyFans could have banned pornography. The amount of online pornography would not drop or be slowed down a hair, no one would know what OnlyFans is, and the moderately attractive women with low self-esteem and lower morals would find a new platform on which to degrade themselves for validation.

The film competently displays a deeply stupid and offensively totalitarian political position and makes the people who really really care about it look stupid. The one exception is in all the footage of the Mostly Peaceful Protest at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, despite the whole kerfuffle being a direct result of Facebook failing to censor people, they somehow failed to film any footage of the Mostly Peaceful Demonstrators actually being on Facebook as they fought back against the institutionally racist oppressor thugs.