Sony Trolls Mark Zuckerberg With Viral ‘The Social Network’ TikTok Ahead of Ban

You’d better lawyer up asshole, because TikTok’s coming back for everything.

Despite the best efforts of some of America’s most powerful technology and media magnates, the Chinese short-form content sharing platform TikTok returned to U.S. phones over the weekend after a brief outage that sent shockwaves through generations Z and younger. The bipartisan effort to eradicate TikTok over security concerns started with an executive order from President Donald Trump during his first term and reached its zenith in April 2024 when President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok if its Chinese tech giant owner ByteDance didn’t sell the app within a year, but with Trump now flip-flopping to the pro-TikTok side of the debate, the dance video and spyware platform’s future now seems more murky than bleak.

Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one of the many Trump allies who is undoubtedly incensed over the president’s reversal on TikTok, seeing as he’s spent many years and many, many millions of dollars lobbying the U.S. government to kick one of his biggest competitors out of the country. But shortly before TikTok’s tumultuous turn-it-off-and-on-again temporary pause this past weekend, Sony Pictures went super viral for side-eyeing Zuckerberg’s political push to the score of Trent Reznor:

In retrospect, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's 2010 based-on-true-events blockbuster was probably a little too generous to the CEO and social media mogul who has spent the 15 years since the release of The Social Network absorbing or banning his competition while engineering the ever-widening political division in America. While TikTok's founders certainly aren’t altruists, Jesse Eisenberg’s envious nerd version of Zuckerberg feels so tame compared to the reptilian megalomaniac who is likely on his laptop right now refreshing TikTok landing page hoping that it will go back down any minute.

Sony’s hilariously direct roast of Zuckerberg exploded in popularity over the weekend, even despite TikTok going down on phones across the country. The above clip now sits at 26 million views, and the response shows that Sony Pictures has re-earned the respect of the public after Kraven the Hunter lost it. “You know what Sony? Hell yeah,” the top comment reads.

“Sony tiktok person knows how to read the room,” another added.

One fan pointed out that similar posts directly calling out tech magnates from verified corporate accounts will become even more commonplace the more Zuckerberg and his buddies try to control the social media market, writing, “Every social media manager is either about to be laid off or have their hours/income cut I’m here for unhinged swan songs.”

“This really resonated with us,” the Hardee’s Restaurants social media manager concurred.