Mark Zuckerberg claims Social Network made up ‘hurtful’ stuff

The David Fincher-directed movie told of the birth of Facebook by Zuckerberg and his friends at Harvard university, and how the fall out saw the young multi-millionaire Zuckerberg face many lawsuits with those he had previously worked with. Zuckerberg though takes umbrage at some of the suggestions and portrayals in the movie, as he has discussed at a recent public Q&A at the company’s Californian headquarters. 

“There were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard to take seriously,” he’s said of the flick which starred Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three including a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. 

Zuckerberg takes issue with some of the things the film suggested or hinted, particularly the notion that his initial motives for building Facebook were associated with the fall-out from a previous relationship at the prestigious US university. 

“”I kind of blocked that one out,” he said last week of Fincher’s movie’s suggestion he was driven by a desire to meet women. 

“I think the reality is that writing code and then building a product and building a company is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about, so you can imagine that a lot of this stuff they had to embellish or make up,” he added.

The Social Network was a huge international smash hit, grossing $225M at the global box office and collecting a number of awards, including the aforementioned gong for Sorkin’s fizzing script. Based as it was though on specific people and real events that were then still then relatively recent, there was a great deal of discussion as to the accuracy of its portrayal of these events and people. Zuckerberg in particular did not come out in a particularly good light. 

The social media mogul has though in the past made light of the movie and its portrayal of him as a perpetually grey T-shirt-clad geek who conquered the world. 

In 2013 he appeared on an episode of famed American TV show Saturday Night Live, alongside Eisenberg, to make light of the film and its portrayal of the facts. 

Photo: via Getty.