Aaron Sorkin plans to write a movie about the January 6 insurrection, with Puck’s Matthew Balloni calling it a quasi-sequel to The Social Network due to its connection to Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
During a recent appearance on The Town podcast with Matthew Belloni, The Social Network screenwriter said he placed a large portion of the blame for the insurrection on Facebook itself, but wouldn’t exactly explain why at the moment.
“I blame Facebook for January 6,” Sorkin said, before joking that, “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket,” to find out why.
Sorkin blames Facebook’s algorithm for divisiveness
Sorkin went on to discuss his reasoning, noting that Facebook’s algorithm has seemingly been fine with promoting more divisive issues over the years, leading many down a rabbit hole of sorts, the blame of which he says falls on Zuckerberg.
“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” said Sorkin. “Because that is what will increase engagement and because that is what will get you to, what they call inside the hallways of Facebook, the infinite scroll.”
“There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity, there isn’t. It’s just growth so if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up tomorrow and realises that there is nothing you can buy for $120bn that you can’t buy for $119bn, so how about if I make a little less money, I will tune up integrity and I will tune down growth.”
