In The Social Network (2010), Mark Zuckerberg creates Facemash before Facebook.
The film depicts Zuckerberg using images taken from Harvard’s online directories to build Facemash, a website that lets users compare photographs of female students. The site spreads rapidly across the campus and attracts attention, while also causing disciplinary trouble because the images were used without permission.
Facemash is presented as an important early step in the film’s account of Zuckerberg’s development as a programmer and entrepreneur. It is separate from TheFacebook, the social-networking site later launched with Eduardo Saverin and other collaborators.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg, and David Fincher directed the film from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. The Social Network is a dramatization, so some personal conversations and timelines differ from disputed real-world accounts. Facemash, however, is a documented project associated with Zuckerberg’s time at Harvard.