Mark doesn't build Facebook to dominate social networking—he builds it to rank people.

The film opens with him rating women on attractiveness, a brutal sorting algorithm disguised as a drunk coding session, and never meaningfully separates that impulse from the product he creates.

When Eduardo and Andrew Garfield's Mark discuss the News Feed late in the film, it's positioned as a minor feature update, a technical refinement that makes Facebook stickier. But Sorkin treats it as character development: Mark's coldness expressed through code.

What he misses is that the News Feed *is* the business model made visible. Chronological feeds show you what your friends posted—ranked feeds show you what keeps you scrolling. One is a social tool, but the other is a persuasion engine. By 2010, when the film was made, this distinction was already obvious because YouTube had proven algorithmic recommendations could hijack attention and Google's search results were being gamed for profit—yet the screenplay treats the News Feed as a minor technical choice rather than the foundational choice. The real prescience isn't that Facebook would win. It's that Facebook could only *keep* winning if it stopped being a network and became a content-ranking system that learned what outraged, divided, and addicted you.

The real prescience isn't that Facebook would win. It's that Facebook could only *keep* winning if it stopped being a network and became a content-ranking system that learned what outraged, divided, and addicted you.

The film documents a narcissist building a tool for narcissism and calls it inevitable. It was only inevitable because nobody—not the filmmakers, not regulators, not most of Silicon Valley—understood that engagement metrics and tribal fragmentation aren't side effects of social networks. They're the actual product.