The Social Network: Mark Zuckerberg's Descent Into The Alt-Right Pipeline
Most movies about tech geniuses play like your average, inspirational TED Talk. You know the type: awkward guy with a hoodie changes the world, stumbles a bit, and ends up the hero with a keynote. But The Social Network is different. It doesn’t try to convince you that Mark Zuckerberg is a genius—it wants to show you what happens when someone builds an empire out of bitterness, ego, and a serious lack of human connection.
Like most biopics, The Social Network takes liberties. It exaggerates for storytelling. Zuckerberg himself brushed it off, saying that the only thing the movie got right was his wardrobe. But while the film may play loose with timelines and details, it nails something far more important: the emotional truth of who Mark Zuckerberg is.
David Fincher wasn't trying to reconstruct history—he was diagnosing a personality. The Zuckerberg we see in the film isn’t driven by innovation, but by resentment, isolation, and an obsession with power. And over a decade later, as the real Zuckerberg aligns himself with far-right figures, oversees a platform that thrives on misinformation, and obsessively rebrands himself in a desperate bid to stay relevant, the film feels less like a dramatization and more like a warning.
One of the clearest examples of this is his treatment of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. In the film, Saverin is quietly pushed out of the company, his shares diluted without his knowledge. When he confronts Zuckerberg in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, the betrayal is personal. He smashes a laptop in rage, but Zuckerberg doesn’t flinch. He’s not interested in fairness; he’s interested in control.
The cruel reality is that this really happened. Internal emails from the time show Zuckerberg writing, “I’m just going to cut him out and then settle with him.” The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, but the film’s portrayal of cold, calculated betrayal feels more like documentation than dramatization.
The same pattern plays out with the Winklevoss twins. In the film, Zuckerberg agrees to help them build HarvardConnection while secretly launching TheFacebook behind their backs. In reality, they sued—and Facebook settled for $65 million. Whether or not he technically "stole" the idea almost doesn’t matter. What matters is the instinct: to manipulate, use, and outmaneuver everyone around him. That same instinct shows up today in how Zuckerberg handles power on a much larger scale.
Over the past several years, Zuckerberg has quietly aligned himself with the far-right. He’s hosted private dinners with Donald Trump, met with Tucker Carlson, and reportedly gave preferential treatment to conservative media outlets. Whistleblower reports and internal documents reveal that Facebook tweaked its algorithm to avoid upsetting conservative voices—even when they spread misinformation and hate speech. In 2021, Zuckerberg rolled back election integrity safeguards, allowing lies about the presidential outcome to flood the platform.
This isn’t political neutrality—it’s strategic complicity. Meta has become a safe haven for extremism under the guise of "free speech," all while raking in ad revenue. Zuckerberg doesn’t need to openly endorse anyone. He just lets the algorithm do it for him.
He’s not alone. Elon Musk has followed a strikingly similar path—buying Twitter, reinstating banned extremists, and openly engaging with far-right conspiracy theories. Both men claim to champion free speech while reshaping their platforms into echo chambers of radical ideology. What The Social Network revealed about Zuckerberg isn’t an isolated case—it’s the first chapter in a broader, troubling tech narrative.
And that willingness to cross lines? It started early. In the film, Facemash is Zuckerberg’s first real act of digital control: hacking into Harvard databases to let students rank female classmates by attractiveness. It’s invasive, dehumanizing, and—it bears repeating—completely real. Harvard shut the site down, but the mindset it revealed never went away.
Today, that same disregard for privacy underpins Meta’s business model. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where tens of millions of users’ data was harvested without consent and used to manipulate political behavior, to the platform’s role in spreading COVID disinformation and fueling far-right radicalization, Facebook has continually chosen reach over responsibility. Data is currency, and ethics are optional.
And what does Zuckerberg do when things fall apart? He pivots. He rebrands. From Facebook to Meta. From social network to metaverse. From democracy to "digital freedom." The final shot of The Social Network—Zuckerberg alone, obsessively refreshing his ex’s Facebook page—is more than just a moment of isolation. It’s a thesis. All that power, and still no connection. Still behind the glass.
When The Social Network came out, it felt like tech-world gossip. Now it looks like a character study to which we should’ve paid closer attention. The film didn’t just tell us how Zuckerberg built Facebook. It told us who he truly is. And in the age of digital radicalization, disinformation, and algorithmic extremism, that version of him—detached, calculating, and quietly complicit—is more relevant than ever.
This remains not just about Zuckerberg. Elon Musk and other tech giants continue following similar paths—amplifying far-right rhetoric, platforming conspiracy theories, and using their platforms as ideological weapons. What started as a film about one man now reads as a blueprint for an entire class of tech leaders drifting further into extremism. The only thing he’s changed is the mask.