As Facebook Takes a Beating, a Brutal Movie Is Set to Make Things Much Worse

A passage from Sorkin's The Social Network screenplay.

Ever since its launch in 2004, Facebook has rolled along like a juggernaut. Users occasionally protest its policies and privacy changes, but the social network shrugs them off and just gets bigger and bigger.

Something different is afoot now. There was no immediate, intense reaction to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled at the f8 conference on April 21: systems that insinuated Facebook across the entire Internet. The earliest responses, in fact, showed something like awe. "Google had better watch out. There may be a new sheriff in web town," TechCrunch wrote.

But over the next few weeks, sparked by a series of security flaws, serious unrest began to percolate—seemingly from all corners. That includes:

• a letter of concern from four U.S. senators,
• a filing with the Federal Trade Commission by 15 privacy groups,
• grave op-eds from the influential people at TechPresident, Wired, Thomas Baekdal, GigaOM, and elsewhere,
• helpful information to make sense of Facebook's evolution, including a timeline from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a clever infographic from an IBM researcher,
• and the launch of an idealistic NYU startup, Diaspora, to cheers—and a surprising groundswell of donations.

Later today, Facebook is reportedly holding an all-staff meeting to address escalating concerns about the company's approach to privacy. This comes on the heels of a less-than-successful Q&A session between a Facebook VP and readers at nytimes.com, which came off as insincere at best and  Orwellian at worst.

Nick Summers @'Newsweek'
Read the script 
HERE