Aaron Sorkin, presumably pissed that he can’t write an episode of The Newsroom about Facebook’s fake-news controversy, wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg himself. The letter, published in the New York Times, addresses the scandal at hand: Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and therefore owner of all our brains (you gotta read the Terms & Conditions), refuses to prohibit untruthful political ads. But Sorkin also takes a moment to air some grudges he’s been holding on to for nine years.
“In 2010, I wrote The Social Network and I know you wish I hadn’t,†Sorkin begins. Throughout the letter, he Trojan-horses in a few decade-old gripes about Facebook’s reaction to The Social Network. Like how Facebook execs asked Sorkin if he “would change the name of Harvard University to something else and if Facebook had to be called Facebook.†Or that time Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg reportedly “stood up in the middle of the screening, turned to the producers who were standing in the back of the room, and said, ‘How can you do this to a kid?’†Sorkin notes that Zuckerberg was 27 years old at the time. The point of all this, it seems, besides bringing the snail-mail drama of The Newsroom back to life, is to remind everyone that Aaron Sorkin thought Mark Zuckerberg was an asshole before it was cool. Nice one, Sorkin. Now can you do the whole letter again, but this time walking down a very long hallway?