The Social Network Gets Zuck All Wrong

Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Social Network, appears to be a "paranoid, sleazy, and grim" imagining of the founding of Facebook, in which Mark Zuckerberg, a cantankerous outsider, creates his social network in a bid to impress buxom women and callow preppies. “That completely misses the point,” writes Rebecca Davis O’Brien in the Daily Beast. O’Brien lived in Zuckerberg’s dorm, and says the savant was never a friendless loner. "Back before he was a household name, before thefacebook.com, Mark Zuckerberg was a dorm room name."

Zuckerberg turned down a Microsoft job and a few million dollars to come to Harvard, which made him instantly famous on campus. He joined a fraternity, where he had the nickname “Slayer.” The only authentic grounds for drama are reports that Zuckerberg resorted to hacking to resolve an early dispute over Facebook’s legitimacy, and his leaked “dumb f---s” message. “It is somewhat fitting,” says O’Brien, “that his behavior as a college student has tarnished his name. In the Facebook era, this is what we fear most.” (More Mark Zuckerberg stories.)