Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired - New York Times

Antoine Antoniol/Bloomberg News, left; Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, left, is portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, right, in “The Social Network.” Mr. Zuckerberg says “the movie is fiction.”

By MICHAEL CIEPLY and MIGUEL HELFT

LOS ANGELES — At the New York Film Festival next month, Hollywood will unleash “The Social Network,” a biting tale of the Silicon Valley giant Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Now Facebook must decide whether to bite back.
After fretting for months over how to respond, the company appears to have decided that its best bet is to largely ignore the movie and hope that audiences do the same — that “The Social Network” will be another failed attempt to bottle a generation, like “Less Than Zero,” and not culturally defining, as it aspires to be, in the way of “Wall Street” or “The Big Chill.”