• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, September 28, 2026

Aaron Sorkin is about to release a movie about Facebook called “The Social Reckoning.” Ten days before it opens, Donald Graham, the former chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company and a former Facebook board member, has decided there is something we need to know: Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy.

"I like Mark Zuckerberg a lot," Graham wrote in an 800-word Facebook post over the weekend. "I think he is a good guy. I am proud to be his friend."

Graham is entitled to his friendship. What is harder to understand is why, in 2026, he thinks Zuckerberg's personal goodness is the question the rest of us should be asking.

In his essay, Graham spends much of his time eviscerating Aaron Sorkin's 2010 film “The Social Network.” He calls it a "bad, dishonest movie," and later "cruel and wrong and dishonest." That movie is 16 years old, and a new Sorkin film is about to hit theaters.

Graham doesn't seem to have seen the new film (few have), but he still passes judgment. "I hope his new movie is better," Graham writes. "I doubt it."

“The Social Reckoning” is about a vastly more consequential question than who Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard. It’s about what Facebook, now Meta, has become.

The new film is based on the work of Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, and Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose reporting on internal Facebook documents became “The Facebook Files,” a series of reports in The Wall Street Journal. (Disclosure: Haugen is on the board of advisors of The Sustainable Media Center, which I lead.)

Those documents opened a window into what Facebook knew inside the company about the effects of its products, and what the company was saying outside the company about them.

Graham's post is interesting, both for what it says, and what it leaves out. His mother was Katharine Graham. His family owned The Washington Post. He spent decades running the Washington Post company. Few Americans have a more intimate connection to the idea that powerful institutions carry responsibilities that extend beyond whether the people running them are personally decent. Facebook became one of those institutions, and it became one of the most consequential forces in the economic crisis facing journalism today.

Facebook siphoned advertising revenue away from news organizations while making publishers increasingly dependent on its traffic. Publishers reorganized businesses around Facebook. Newsrooms hired staff and built products around strategies designed to satisfy Facebook's algorithms. The company encouraged a massive shift toward video, while its video metrics later became the subject of litigation and controversy. Then Facebook changed direction.

The damage was not abstract. News organizations lost money, jobs and leverage. Local journalism weakened. Facebook became one of the most powerful distributors of news in the world while employing virtually no journalists to produce that news, while reserving the right to decide at any moment how much journalism its users would see.

Graham watched that transformation from an unusually close vantage point.

He met Zuckerberg in January 2005, when Zuckerberg was 20. Graham says he offered $6 million for 10% of Facebook. Zuckerberg declined. They remained friends, and Zuckerberg invited Graham onto Facebook's board. Graham served until June 2015.

And, even as Facebook was putting journalism dollars in its coffers, Facebook compensated Graham for his service on its board, principally with Facebook stock. His original board grant was one million restricted stock units. After Facebook became public, those shares became extraordinarily valuable. And Facebook continued to compensate him.

In 2013, Facebook reported Graham's board compensation at $437,874: $50,000 in cash and $387,874 in stock awards. In 2014, it reported another $370,551: $50,000 in cash and $320,551 in stock awards.

Shortly before Graham left the board in 2015, Facebook's SEC filing reported that he beneficially owned 686,900 Facebook shares. At Facebook's share price at the time, that position was worth roughly $55 million.

That does not mean Facebook "paid Graham $55 million." Much of that value came from the spectacular appreciation of Facebook stock after it was awarded. But it does mean something more substantial than Graham's description that Zuckerberg "invited me to join Facebook's board." Facebook made Graham a very wealthy Facebook shareholder.

And the relationship extended to Graham's family. His daughter Molly joined Facebook in 2008, a year before her father joined the board. Facebook subsequently disclosed paying her $644,965 in cash compensation through 2012, plus an undisclosed amount of Facebook equity, which was certainly not inconsiderable.

There is an important fact on Graham's side of this ledger. He publicly said he intended to give his Facebook shares to education-related charities. Shortly before leaving Facebook's board, Graham pledged $15 million to TheDream.US, the scholarship organization he co-founded for undocumented students, on top of $10 million he had already given.

Meta has never split its stock. At today's share price, the 686,900 shares Graham held in 2015 would be worth more than $500 million. If Graham gave those shares to charity, as he said he would, that is a huge gift, and one worth celebrating. But I could not find a public record showing that the shares were sold, that they were donated, or where the money went. Graham's last required filing, in May 2015, shows him holding all 686,900 shares. Once he left the board, he no longer had to report what he did with them. His essay does not say.

There is nothing inherently improper about Graham's philanthropy, and none of these financial relationships proves that his defense of Zuckerberg was purchased.

But they are part of the relationship readers deserve to be aware of.

There is no evidence I have seen that Graham is acting at Meta's direction or that his essay is part of an organized campaign against the film. Without evidence, it would be irresponsible to say otherwise.

But Graham has put a question on the table that is larger than Aaron Sorkin. He wants us to consider whether Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. That may be a meaningful question between friends. It is a much smaller question for the rest of us, and coming from Graham, it carries an obvious contradiction.

Graham spent decades at the center of American journalism. He understood, or should have understood, that journalism is not merely a collection of individual reporters and editors. It is an institution with obligations to the public. Facebook helped damage that institution.

And when journalists used Facebook's own documents to investigate what the company knew about the consequences of its products, Facebook accused the Journal of deliberately mischaracterizing what the company was trying to do.

Graham knows this history. He lived close to it. He also served on Facebook's board, was compensated substantially for doing so, became the owner of Facebook stock worth tens of millions of dollars, and remained Zuckerberg's friend. Again, none of that proves Graham's defense is dishonest.

It does make his argument harder to take simply at face value when he asks us to focus on whether Zuckerberg is personally a "good guy" while largely avoiding the institutional record.

And the institutional record is now being written in court. In March 2026, juries returned two verdicts against Meta, for $375 million and $6 million. On August 26, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle claims by 47 states and the District of Columbia that it designed Instagram to be addictive, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harm, and misled the public about the safety of its platforms. This was the largest state consumer protection settlement in U.S. history outside the tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

On Sept. 25, a jury in Santa Fe found that Facebook deceived users about how it protected tits data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a deception that affected all of New Mexico's more than two million residents. A judge will set the penalty. Thousands more cases, including suits from roughly 1,200 school districts, are still pending.

After two decades of Facebook, the question is not whether Mark Zuckerberg is pleasant to know. It is what he did with the extraordinary institution he built, what that institution did to journalism and public life, what Facebook itself knew about the consequences, and what responsibility belongs to the person who has controlled it throughout.

Don Graham can tell us why he likes Mark Zuckerberg. He still has not told us why that should matter.