‘The Social Reckoning’ Already Feels Irrelevant
Wired · LC · trust 37/100
Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning. Photograph: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story When The Social Network hit theaters in 2010, it was fair to wonder if the film had come too soon . Facebook had been launched from Mark Zuckerberg ’s Harvard dorm room just six years earlier, and nobody really knew how it would reshape digital community in the decade to come.
But, with a breakneck screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, a menacingly propulsive soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and a surgical performance from Jesse Eisenberg as Young Zuck, director David Fincher delivered a slick corporate thriller about the major drama to that point: intersecting lawsuits over who owned what percentage of the platform and who could lay claim as a founder. It was an electrifying film that seemed to only lightly fictionalize the newest and perhaps most cutthroat generation of Silicon Valley warlords.
Flash forward 16 years, and Facebook (now Meta ) has accumulated more scandals than Hollywood could possibly hope to keep up with. Sorkin tells WIRED that he was approached many times over those years with pitches for a sequel, though he struggled to see an angle of approach. “Before a film can be anything else, before it can be relevant or thought-provoking, it has to be good,” he says. “It has to work as something that you watch while you're eating popcorn.”
Then, Sorkin says, he met Frances Haugen , the former Facebook data engineer who leaked damning internal memos to investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. Horwitz wrote up what became known as the “ Facebook Files ” in a far-ranging 2021 series of articles for The Wall Street Journal , exposing much of what the company knew regarding harms to users—everything from hate speech and medical misinformation to body image issues and human trafficking—but had largely brushed aside in pursuit of growth.
Sorkin still wasn’t sure he had a film, but one day he asked Haugen why she finally decided to go to the media. “She just told me in kind of an offhand way, ‘Oh, I had this friend who was radicalized by Facebook after spending too many hours on the platform,’” he recalls. “And I began to get the idea for what is now the opening scene of the movie.”
The cold open of The Social Reckoning , written and directed by Sorkin, depicts an intoxicated woman pulled over on the side of the road in San Mateo, California, with an overheated car. Approached by police officers, she turns combative, pulling out her phone to record a video as she hurls racist abuse at the cops and is at last arrested for threatening to kill one of them. The video turns up on a Facebook page for far-right content, which is where Haugen (Mikey Madison) finds it in 2019, recognizing the woman as an acquaintance from her pilates class who used to hold progressive views. She also learns that this woman is a superuser, intensely active on Facebook for many hours each day.
Haugen first tries to get her colleagues at Facebook to recognize how their own algorithms are pushing many users, including her former friend, into extremist feeds. It’s only when she hits enough walls that she puts her tentative trust in Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a journalist whom Facebook staff have been explicitly warned not to speak to. As they develop the bickering rapport of two focused professionals with clashing ideals—Haugen wants to save the company from itself, while Horwitz suspects it’s too late for that—we see flash-forwards of Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) rehearsing for a congressional hearing on social media misinformation in 2021. In the room are a crisis PR adviser named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku) and Charlie (Bill Burr), a composite ex-employee (as in, not specifically based on any living individual). He’s been brought in as an agitator with the freedom to get under Zuck’s skin and dismantle his practiced talking points.
This plot structure is clunkier than the cross-cutting depositions of The Social Network , which neatly allowed for the characters to recount the early days of Facebook without narrative hand-holding. By comparison, The Social Reckoning is clogged with portentous intertitles (the first sequence is even labeled a “prologue”) and visual cues to remind us where we are in the timeline. From scene to scene, the sharp-edged performances and familiar crackle of Sorkinese dialog (which leaves room for the occasional and delightfully odd non sequitur) make for engaging fare. But the pieces fit together awkwardly—and you do wish Reznor and Ross were around to boost the momentum.
The movie arrives as part of a crowded slate of keenly anticipated tech films. There’s Artificial , Luca Guadagnino’s satire about the firing and rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2023; it picked up significant buzz as Amazon MGM dropped it this summer following a $50 billion deal between Amazon and OpenAI. Alex Gibney’s epic documentary Musk covers the exploits of the world’s richest man up through his disastrous reign as a “government efficiency” czar in the White House. And don’t forget You Can See Everything , for which directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim gained close access to Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes shortly before she began serving a decade-long prison sentence.
Amid these timely offerings, The Social Reckoning is just a touch out of step. Its climax (spoiler alert) is the January 6 Capitol riot, the horrors of which are blamed in part on Facebook’s failure to either get a handle on election fraud conspiracy theories or remove Donald Trump’s account as he stoked such inflammatory falsehoods. Now, halfway into Trump’s second term, is it all that much of a revelation that he and his movement are emboldened by the complicity of tech oligarchs, who openly backed him in 2024?
Nevertheless, there are big issues at play here. The debate over ethics in tech continually boils over into…
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