In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg said the film The Social Network, which portrayed Facebook’s founding, was “kind of hurtful”. Now, Sony Pictures has taken a swipe at the Meta CEO through an Instagram ad promoting second part of the film – The Social Reckoning, which revisits the controversies surrounding the social media company. The ad features actor Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg and carries the message: “Mark Zuckerberg will LOVE The Social Reckoning*.” The punchline appears in the fine print: “*Instagram doesn’t fact-check most ads. Why should we?”
Sony’s Instagram ad takes a dig at Mark Zuckerberg
The promotional video cuts between scenes of Jeremy Strong playing Mark Zuckerberg, including one in which the character wears headphones. The on-screen text initially suggests that the Meta CEO will enjoy the film, before the asterisk reveals the jab at Instagram’s approach to fact-checking advertisements.The ad ends with Strong’s Zuckerberg asking, “Did you know this was happening?” before the film’s title appears.The film’s Instagram page added another pointed line in its caption: “Let’s see how long it takes them to take this down.” According to the original report, the video had received more than 9,000 likes, 300 shares and 72 comments. Meta had not removed it at the time of the report, and the company did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Why Mark Zuckerberg called the first film hurtful
As stated above, Mark Zuckerberg had previously criticised The Social Network, the 2010 film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher. In a public question-and-answer session in 2014, he said the filmmakers got some details right, including the design of Facebook’s office, but “just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful”. He specifically objected to the film’s suggestion that he created Facebook to attract women.Aaron Sorkin has now returned to the subject with The Social Reckoning, which he wrote and directed. Sony describes it as a companion piece to the earlier film rather than a direct sequel.The new film focuses on Facebook’s more recent controversies and is told largely through the perspective of Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison. Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021. The documents helped expose concerns about the company’s knowledge of problems linked to its platforms, including Instagram’s effects on teenage girls’ mental health.
