That divide has closed quite a bit in four years, but now that Aaron Sorkin turned Facebook’s seedy origins into the box office smash The Social Network, there’s a similar divide in the reaction to the movie: 18 to 34 year olds like Facebook even more, while the site’s reputation fell among adults over 50.

That’s according to survey data from YouGov BrandIndex, which interviews 5000 people every weekday, asking them to guage what they think of various companies and brands.

The upswing among 18 to 34 year olds is dramatic — rising from 23.5 on September 22 to 46.4 on opening day (October 1) then up to 51.5 on October 6 (the day Facebook released its new groups feature).

That’s despite the fact that the movie features no redeeming characters — depicting Facebook’s founding as a combination of backstabbing idea-borrowing, a way to get revenge on an ex-girlfriend and an attempt to vault Mark Zuckerberg into the upper echelon of Harvard society. Meanwhile Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and one-time Facebook president, is portrayed as a paranoid playboy with a taste for coke and underage girls.

But perhaps the 18 to 34 year olds generation sees the movie as Wired’s Fred Vogelstein did:

I don’t know if Zuckerberg stole the idea behind Facebook from the Winklevosses. I don’t know if he cheated Eduardo Saverin. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter. They didn’t build the company, Zuckerberg did, and in Silicon Valley, at least, that’s all that matters.

Perhaps the movie works because Facebook has defined a generation and fought its way to the center of the web. And now that the site has a creation myth, and ugly or not, it’s a gripping tale full of driven youngsters building one of the world’s most valuable companies with late night coding binges and drinking games, making that myth good enough for Hollywood and the Facebook generation.

Graphic: Courtesy of YouGov BrandIndex

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See Also:

• Mark Zuckerberg: I Donated to Open Source, Facebook Competitor
• Zuckerberg: No Date in Mind for Facebook IPO
• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg To Give $100 Million to Newark, NY School System
• The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
• Love Google. Hate Facebook. Here’s Why
• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Net

Authors: Ryan Singel

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