Claire Foy to star as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in TV drama
The Crown's Claire Foy will star as Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in a TV adaptation of Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang's bestselling book, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.
The series, called Doomsday Machine, will "lift the veil on the relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg and the obstacles Facebook has faced on its relentless quest for growth", according to Variety. Journalists have been brought on board to advise on the script to ensure the plot's accuracy.
The drama will begin in 2016 with the US presidential election and the rise of fake news, including the recent disclosure of a program called XCHECK, which exempted high-profile users, including Donald Trump, from some or all of Facebook's rules and regulations. According to the Wall Street Journal's investigation for example, it allowed Brazilian footballer Neymar to post naked pictures of a woman who had accused him of rape.
A synopsis for the book reads: "Drawing on their unrivalled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang (award-winning New York Times reporters) take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth.
"Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg."
The drama will also expose how the company ignored mental health risks posed by Instagram to younger users and "the push by Zuckerberg to use the News Feed as his own propaganda machine to push out articles with positive slants about Facebook", Variety adds.
Doomsday Machine will be written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.
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