When The Social Network hit theaters in 2010, it was fair to wonder if the film had come too soon. Facebook had been launched from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room just six years earlier, and nobody really knew how it would reshape digital community in the decade to come.

But, with a breakneck screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, a menacingly propulsive soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and a surgical performance from Jesse Eisenberg as Young Zuck, director David Fincher delivered a slick corporate thriller about the major drama to that point: intersecting lawsuits over who owned what percentage of the platform and who could lay claim as a founder. It was an electrifying film that seemed to only lightly fictionalize the newest and perhaps most cutthroat generation of Silicon Valley warlords.

Flash forward 16 years, and Facebook (now Meta) has accumulated more scandals than Hollywood could possibly hope to keep up with. Sorkin tells WIRED that he was approached many times over those years with pitches for a sequel, though he struggled to see an angle of approach. “Before a film can be anything else, before it can be relevant or thought-provoking, it has to be good,” he says. “It has to work as something that you watch while you're eating popcorn.”

Then, Sorkin says, he met Frances Haugen , the former Facebook data engineer who leaked damning internal memos to investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. Horwitz wrote up what became known as the “ Facebook Files ” in a far-ranging 2021 series of articles for The Wall Street Journal , exposing much of what the company knew regarding harms to users—everything from hate speech and medical misinformation to body image issues and human trafficking—but had largely brushed aside in pursuit of growth.

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