Aaron Sorkin to write movie on Jan. 6 riot: 'I blame Facebook for January 6'

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is writing a film about the Jan. 6 insurrection and how he believes Facebook’s “divisive material” influenced the attack on the nation’s Capitol.

Sorkin, the writer famous for "The West Wing," "The Social Network" and the HBO series "The Newsroom," put it bluntly in a podcast episode of “The Town with Matthew Belloni”: "I blame Facebook for January 6.”

When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.”

“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” he said in a live podcast episode recorded in Washington, D.C. “Because that is what will increase engagement and because that is what will get you to, what they call inside the hallways of Facebook, the infinite scroll.”

When asked whose responsibility that was, he replied: “Mark Zuckerberg.”

In 2019, Sorkin wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, criticizing Facebook’s policy of allowing politicians to post blatantly false advertisements.

Sorkin said he has yet to have a conversation with the Facebook CEO that isn’t “through the op-ed pages of The New York Times.”

After Election Day in 2020, Facebook groups grew with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s win, with many calling for political violence, according to a report from ProPublica.

Facebook did not immediately respond to POLITICO's request for comment.

The country is still reeling after Jan. 6 when rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol, leaving a lasting impact on the country and Congress. More than 1,265 defendants have been charged in nearly all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Sorkin would neither confirm nor deny the project is a sequel to “The Social Network.”

During the podcast, Sorkin was also asked whether “The West Wing” could still work as a television show today.

“The show premiered in 1999 and so much of the mail that we got would begin with, ‘I’m a Republican and I don’t agree with the political positions that your characters take,’ but what they appreciated was [the characters’] sense of patriotism, the sense of commitment,” Sorkin said. “The show romanticized public service. … I don’t know that in today’s climate, you would get the ‘I’m a Republican but.’ I think that they would likely see everything as an attack on what was happening right now.”