Author of the original book "The Social Network": I have long seen through Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg believes that the more we share, the better the world is, whether we like it or not

Editor's note: Ben Mezrich, the author of the original book The Social Network, looks back on more than a decade of Mark Zuckerberg's career, revealing the story behind Zuckerber's intention to break down our privacy barriers. Ben Mezrich, original title i was right about mark zuckerberg.

"Ben Mezrich clearly aspires to be a Jackie Collins in Silicon Valley."

It was the summer of 2009, and I had just published my own book, "The Accidental Billionaires," about how Facebook was built —aaron Sorkin and David Fincher quickly adapted the book into the Oscar-winning film "Social Network." I was on a book tour, and I had to run from this cable news outlet to another, and almost every stop, Mark Zuckerberg's rebuttal was waiting for me to answer, and his company spokesman, Elliot Schrage, was in charge of being the sounding board. I believed— and still believe— that my account of Facebook's founding and development in college dormitories was true and fair, and the whole storyline was like a Shakespeare play about a group of socially ill-social friends who launched a revolution. But Zuckerberg doesn't agree, and his main concern seems to be that I'm suggesting that he created Facebook to meet more girls. This was followed by the subtitle of my book – "A Story of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal." When news about "the accidental billionaires" leaked to the internet before publication along with the subtitle, one of the words that most panicked Facebook's PR team seemed to be "betrayal."

The focus of the PR team is, who is betrayed?

Ten years later, the issue is all the more important as watching Facebook grow into a tech giant worth hundreds of billions as we know it today, buffeted by a series of scandals ranging from allegations of misuse of personal data to facebook's platform being used to interfere in elections. The answer to this question goes straight to the heart of Facebook.

As my book and film adaptations describe, Facebook's history is well known. Late one night after a failed date, Zuckerberg created a website called Facemash that allowed his Harvard classmates to compare female classmates based on photos he had collected from various dorm registries. When the prank site caught the attention of Harvard administration, Zuckerberg was nearly expelled from the school for "violating security, copyright, and personal privacy." While he managed to avoid any substantial punishment, he also attracted the attention of the two brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, a 6-foot-5-inch Pair of Olympic rowers.

The twins are building their own social networking site, Harvardconnection, which later evolved into connectu and is looking for programmers in the market. They contacted Zuckerberg, who readily agreed to work for them. That's when Zuckerberg went to his friend and classmate Eduardo Saverin and offered him the idea of creating a new website where people could connect with each other and post their profiles — without, of course, getting him expelled from school. He wanted Saverin to be able to fund his ideas, so Saverin offered $1,000 — what should be the most prescient investment in world history — in exchange for the CFO title and a 30 percent stake in the company.

A few weeks later, in February 2004, Zuckerberg sent a slew of emails to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, claiming that he was too busy with his classwork to continue helping them with their coding work. Zuckerberg then released his own Facebook, which later became a phenomenal presence. Zuckerberg eventually arrives in California, where he meets Sean Parker — and of course eduardo Saverin goes too , but the two soon find themselves removed from the story , not only the name disappearing from Facebook's masthead , but also the dilution of their stake in the company.

What happened in the first few months of Facebook's existence has provided a lot of testimony to my subtitle, but that's just part of the story.

From the beginning, Facebook shouldn't just be a new social network — it should be a social revolution. Zuckerberg never wanted to make money through the site, and in high school he turned down a lucrative software development job. Although Saverin has been urging Zuckerberg to find a way to get money from Facebook, Zuckerberg has never put it first. Instead, Facebook should be a cool thing, something that changes the world by changing the way we communicate with each other. Facebook is not a website you visit, but a place where you live. By sharing yourself in the social circle of friends, family, and colleagues, you connect with a growing community. The more you share, the more connections you can make. So the less you pay attention to your privacy and data, the better Facebook's functionality and the greater the power of the revolution.

Yes, Zuckerberg created Facebook to help kids like himself who aren't good at socializing meet girls — but he's also committed to developing an online community that aims to break down barriers between people by changing our concept of privacy. Zuckerberg believes that the more we share, the better the world will be, whether we like it or not. While he seems genuinely surprised by Facebook's privacy scandals over the years, everything he's done to break down our privacy barriers is not unintentional. Privacy and Facebook can be said to be the opposite. The focus on privacy limits the contact, which isn't the experience Facebook wants to provide, and it assumes that the data you put on Facebook shouldn't have been private in the first place.

This goes back to my subtitle, back to the concept of "betrayal." From the beginning, Zuckerberg exhibited a pattern of deviating from and abandoning people and things that did not conform to his worldview and ambitions. Just as Zuckerberg dumped the Winklevoss brothers and eduardo Saverin, he's also struggling to shake off our concerns about invasions of privacy and mishandling of data. But the problem is that when we find out that what we thought was private information wasn't actually private, we feel betrayed.

That's why I'm sure I'm right about Mark Zuckerberg — and why each of us empathizes with what happened to Winklevoss.