*Sigh* well that was complete revisionist history. Hello catholiccontrivery here, and when I saw that there was going to be a movie about the 2021 Facebook Files news story I was pretty excited, especially when the trailers highlighted how powerful Facebook had become, and how they were more powerful than national governments. Now I admittedly didn't follow the coverage very closely, but I remember it basically validating everything I've suspected about facebook being evil ever since like 2008. Basically the story was all about how facebook was knowingly causing harm to it's users through over use and negative imagery, causing body dysmorphia in teens and addiction in the general userbase, collecting an unimaginable amount of data on it's users without any transparency about how that data was being used and where they were getting it from, and how they were putting their thumbs on the scales of elections boosting stories favorable to the left and suppressing stories favorable to the right (particularly the Hunter Biden laptop story that would have changed the 2020 election), with it all coming to how they were arguably acting as a publisher while operating under section 230 common carrier protections. It also highlighted how much of a lizard person Mark Zuckerberg is when he had to testify in front of congress. This movie though, well it was highly inaccurate.
First though, I have to give credit where it's due. On a technical level, this movie is pretty good. The acting is really good, especially the parts with Mark Zuckerberg. Unlike this directors first attempt at telling a facebook story (which I reviewed 15 years ago, WOW), Mark doesn't talk at double the speed, and he REALLY captured the lizard person aspect of Mark from the congressional hearings. Francis and Jeff are also really good (even if I just see Max from Better Things and Carmy from The Bear), I really could see them as a Facebook engineer and investigative reporter, with very believable emotions and actions. Bill Burr's character also was great, an early investor who knew Mark from the beginning and is the only one to can talk frankly to him, yeah totally believable and I could definitely see his Charlie character being a real person. The directing is also quite good, especially with how it relates to the pacing and editing (for the most part, the opening scene is a little sloppy, but that might have been on purpose). One thing this movie does is go back and forth between Mark preparing for the congressional hearing and the progression of events in the breaking of the story, and the way it cuts between scenes and shots is pretty good on a technical level. It also divides the story up into chapters, which is can come off as tacky or pretentious, but it worked in this movie, so I'll give it that. There's also some good laugh out loud moments, where I did audibly laugh. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be comic relief, but if not, happy accident.
I also want to briefly talk about the rating. The movie is rated R, but it's not a very strong R, I'd argue that it's pretty soft. The general rule is that you can only say "f---" once in a PG-13 movie, and if you say it any more times you get an R rating. I wasn't exactly keeping track, but I think this movie says it like 5 or 6 times, which is more than once. There's also "the riot at the end of the movie" (which I will go into more detail in due time), where you see people with bleeding heads from cuts and similar, but it's nothing worse that what you'd see in pro-wrestling. Quinton Tarantino or Robert Rodrigues, this is not. There's also a short scene where it's "explicitly implied" that a character was about to have sex, but they're both still covered up; the man still has pants on and the woman still has "skimpy gym attire" (meant to be underwear, but it covered even more than a normal bra and brief cut panties), you see worse on network TV. When I noticed it was rated R I thought "I wonder what kind of gratuitous Oppenheimer sex scenes we'll get," but there weren't any. When this inevitably airs on TV with a TV-14 rating, basically all they're going to have to do is mute the f-bombs and not change anything else.
[Spoiler warning]
OK, it's about time that I get into why this movie is revisionist fiction. Instead of focusing on...anything I mentioned in my opening paragraph about the actual news stories and studies, the movie primarily focused on how Facebook was "sending people down the alt-right pipeline" and how they "weren't doing enough to police posts," with only 2 very brief mentions about how facebook and its subsidiaries were harming teens; once in a restaurant scene where a girl was getting bullied online and the bullies were using facebook groups as a loophole around the bullying rules, and another when one of the other employees said "here's a classified internal study where we found the harm instagram is doing to teen girls," and then there were some casual mentions about how drug traffickers and human traffickers were operating in the open and some other things of that nature, but they didn't get any kind of attention. Everything else in this movie was about how facebook was pushing an algorithm that was leading people into "hate groups" (becoming right wing), and "allowing people to spread misinformation, particularly about covid and the 2020 election," with emphasis on not fact checking political ads, with Mark's excuse being that "Facebook and its subsidiaries are open platforms, and Mark Zuckerberg is a free speech absolutist since Facebook is the town square and to do so otherwise would be to violate section 230 since now they would be acting as a publisher." *deep breath in...and breath out.* What fantasy world are you living in? Facebook is/was allowing people to spread right wing misinformation? Facebook was suppressing right wing users during this time, Steven Crowder did an experiment with that and found that he was being suppressed. Other conservative users did the same thing, "facebook jail (temporary suspension) for telling the truth" was a super common thing back then. Everyone on the left was saying "well if you don't like it then go build your own facebook," which is why places like minds and meewee were made. "Mark is a free speech absolutist," yeah and next you'll be telling me Kim Jon Un has a sense of humor and can laugh at himself. "Facebook allowed users to spread vaccine misinformation and falsehoods about the novel virus," *ppppppttttthhhhh raspberry* Facebook was taking down practicing doctors saying "masks aren't doing anything, quote the CDC, for young people this is no more dangerous than the flu." Let's also not forget the Hunter Biden laptop story, a news story that FACEBOOK BLOCKED PEOPLE FROM SHARING THE LINK TO "because it was misinformation, fake news, propaganda" (that was confirmed to be true after the election where analysts agree that if it was allowed to be shared it would have changed the results of the 2020 election). But yeah, keep telling yourself that Mark Zuckerberg is a free speech absolutist.
The end is what REALLY angered me. The end of this movie is about January 6th 2021, specifically Facebook's response to it. What it shows is a mob congregating at the capital and it being spread all over Facebook. They also said "is he [president Trump] saying anything" and "no." Then they showed a very violent mob, with the rioters smashing windows, trampling police officers, and bashing them in the head, with capital police being carried into a room on makeshift stretchers made of the barricade fence. And then when they banned "the president" it was depicted as being some super hard decision. That was just straight up lies and bull. First off, president Trump said "peacefully and patriotically let your voices be known," AND told people "stop, go home, don't cause a riot." That was just straight up lies. Also, that was not what the day was. Once the videos were declassified, it was a walking tour; some people got a little carried away, but it was not the antifa or BLM riot that the media pretends it was. Lastly, there's no way that Facebook thought it was some "hard decision," they were salivating at the prospect at banning President Trump, but they couldn't because of how bad it would look if they deplatformed a sitting president.
Just a terrible movie, nothing but lies and propaganda. I didn't really have anywhere to put this before, but another thing this movie did was try to say that new media replacing legacy media was a bad thing "because there's no credentials, no vetting, people just report whatever they want." Right, because people gatekeeping information is a good thing, because those gate keepers will report on vital information like how Joe Biden had serious cognitive declines, Hunter Biden throwing a gun away at a school, Ashley Biden writing in a diary how her dad would shower with her LONG after it was creepy, Barak Obama telling foreign adversaries "I'll be more flexible after the election," Kamala extending prisoner's sentences because of free labor, Hillary Clinton deleting 30K subpoenaed emails, Gretchen Whitmer sending young covid patients to nursing homes, Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota, Nick Sandman just calmly smiling as a drug addict Native American chanted in his face while trying to slander a high school kid, the violence that is found in the BLM and Antifa riots, and all sorts of other things...oh wait, no they completely buried those stories and instead wanted to run non-stop coverage of how the right was doing trivial things, and the only reason any of these got through was because of new media. And then during the epilogue thing where it said what happened to everyone after the events of the movie, they said something like "in response to not fact checking ads, facebook decided to stop fact checking all together" like it's a bad thing. Oh, you mean the same fact checkers that said it was "mostly false" when asked "the German government made and distributed leaflets to discourage sexual assault after an incident in Cologne New Years Eve 2015-2016," because the leaflets were actually first made in 2013 for something similar and were redistributed because of things. Yeah, no, that was just back handed censorship without censoring. Just, don't watch this movie. This has been catholiccontriversy, signing off, and may God bless you.
