On Thursday, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, a devout liberal who wrote the script for the film “The Social Network,” which portrayed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a hard-hearted villain only interested in himself, attacked Zuckerberg in an op-ed for The New York Times, titled: “Aaron Sorkin: An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook isn’t defending free speech, it’s assaulting truth.”
Sorkin wrote, “It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended — on free speech grounds — Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates.”
Sorkin huffed, “I admire your deep belief in free speech. I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong … Last year, over 40 percent of Americans said they got news from Facebook. Of course the problem could be solved by those people going to a different news source, or you could decide to make Facebook a reliable source of public information.”
Zuckerberg responded to Sorkin by using Sorkin’s own words from the screenplay for “The American President”:
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say: You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.
In 2014, speaking at a Q&A at Facebook’s headquarters, Zuckerberg said of “The Social Network,” for which Sorkin won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, “I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that movie in a while. I kind of blocked that one out … 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. They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot – they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful … there were pretty glaring things that were just made up about the movie that made it pretty hard to take seriously.”
When he won the Oscar for “The Social Network,” Sorkin stated, “This movie is going to be a source of pride for me every day for the rest of my life.’
Social media noted Zuckerberg’s takedown of Sorkin:
Oh dear. Flattened. https://t.co/0EXr1b1C78
— Josh Holmes (@HolmesJosh) October 31, 2019
Never mess with a human algorithm.
Zuckerberg just slaughtered him in broad daylight. https://t.co/khQ9tpTMWs
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) October 31, 2019
There was more:
Icing on the cake is 3 pieces of misinformation in Sorkin's piece in the New York Times they had to issue corrections for pic.twitter.com/Sipk9WB5Ec
— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) October 31, 2019
The big First Amendment case involving Larry Flynt, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, was about political satire, not pornography. https://t.co/6x8QvawYPa pic.twitter.com/JbCSxNZLAt
— Bill Hammond (@NYHammond) October 31, 2019
H/T Twitchy