After his girlfriend breaks up with him, following a bad date, where his ego and abrasiveness brings out the worst in him, Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg gets the idea to build a website to rate the attractiveness of female Harvard undergraduates. Half-drunk he spends the course of a night hacking into the databases of various dorms, downloading the names and pictures of female students. Using an algorithm for ranking chess players provided by his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Mark creates a website called “FaceMash.com”, where male students can rate the attractiveness of female students.

Following the breakdown of Harvard’s computer network by the site’s traffic, Mark is given six months of academic probation and the majority of the female students at Harvard start to despise him. However, identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, notice him and employ Mark to work as their website’s, Harvard Connection, programmer. Soon after, Mark speaks to his friend Eduardo and shares his concept for “The Facebook,” a social networking website that is only accessible to Harvard University students.