What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in The Social Reckoning
Slate · L · trust 48/100
The Social Network (2010) was sort of Facebook’s origin story, with founder Mark Zuckerberg initially presented as a largely sympathetic character—a socially awkward weakling getting metaphorical sand kicked in his face by the smug, rich, muscle-bound Winklevoss twins. But by the end of the film, we see the glimmerings of the mature Zuckerberg—ruthless, focused, and ready to throw his co-founder and only friend under the bus in pursuit of power.
Now, 16 years later, Aaron Sorkin has written a sequel to his earlier script, where Zukerberg (trading Jesse Eisenberg for Jeremy Strong) is revealed in his final form as a contemporary Citizen Kane, the very model of a modern media mogul, determined to maintain his company’s stock value whatever the cost to society, democracy, or individual lives. As with Citizen Kane , in The Social Reckoning the ostensible major character remains unknowable, with a journalist—in in this case the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White)—acting as our guide into his highly guarded world.
The actual protagonist is Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), an introverted data scientist who journeys from being a true believer in Facebook’s potential to permit the voices of ordinary people to be heard and to promote social connection into a disillusioned but empowered whistleblower. She is motivated by the company’s cynical indifference to the proven harms caused by its prioritizing profit over all else.
The Social Reckoning ’s other cinematic touchstone is, of course, All the President’s Men , complete with dogged investigative reporter, reluctant source, purloined documents, and a powerful and paranoid target. The film is thus firmly in the old-fashioned “legacy media journalists taking on vested interests as guardians of democracy” camp, as opposed to the currently fashionable “legacy media journalists as integrity-free sellouts complicit with the vested interests they’re supposed to be scrutinizing.” A film that champions truth and serving the public over propaganda sets a high bar for itself, particularly when it’s a work of fiction that might tweak the facts to make the drama more compelling. With this in mind, we look at what’s information and what’s disinformation in The Social Reckoning.
From the moment Jeff shows up at his new job at the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 2019, it is clear he’s not a techie. His new colleagues are astonished to learn he doesn’t use GPS and still relies on maps. Nor is he on Facebook. When Frances becomes his source, she is constantly astonished by how analog he is and how much she has to explain to him.
When Aaron Sorkin started talking to the reporter about making a film based on his and Haugen’s books, the writer/director said he’d be taking some liberties with the Horwitz character. “He told me that he thought he’d need to change some chronology and details to make the story he had in mind work,” Horwitz recalled . “He also told me that he wanted to take some liberties with ‘Movie Jeff,’ who was sort of going to be a fictionalized, investigative reporter composite.”
While we can’t know exactly how tech-savvy Horwitz really was, chances are that while he may have been no match for Facebook engineers when it came to understanding how to design algorithms or track user engagement, he was not quite as hopeless as the film suggests. Before joining the Wall Street Journal, Horwitz was a financial and investigative reporter for the Associated Press’s D.C. bureau, where he broke stories such as Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s secret efforts to advance Russian interests, and he previously had worked at American Banker, where he exposed how banks profited from the sale of overpriced insurance. The point is: It takes a certain amount of IT familiarity to be able to pursue complicated digital paper trails. Horwitz also told Reuters that “source cultivation takes a long time in real life. I’ve found that the best sources are almost always ones that are off-the-radar, and that you have to demonstrate that you already know a great deal about a subject before they’ll talk to you,” which would seem to suggest he was not a complete tech ignoramus when Haugen first contacted him or else she wouldn’t have continued with the connection.
In the film, Jeff initially reaches out to members of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, which was tasked with looking at how information about elections was treated on the platform, as well as at how the platform could be used to disseminate political disinformation. In search of a story, he contacts several members of the team via LinkedIn, but the only one who responds is a nervous Frances, who, after much persuasion and reassurance, meets him in a park location chosen for giving her a view of anyone approaching them. She is very worried that someone will see her with Jeff (whom Facebook employees have already been warned off contacting), and she will be sued for violating her nondisclosure agreement. At work, Frances is condescended to by her fellow Civic Integrity team members and, although highly capable at her job, is reluctant to assert herself or speak up. She keeps to herself and remains somewhat isolated. Meanwhile, her personal life appears to be nonexistent and when she finally ventures on to a dating app, she can’t leave the date it’s arranged with a finance bro fast enough.
As she gets drawn into providing more material, she continues to meet Jeff in the park and then in the apartment he’s renting, where she dresses like she’s on a date so she has plausible deniability in case she runs into anyone from work.
In reality, Horwitz did reach out to a number of members of the Civic Integrity team before the 2020 election, but Haugen didn’t contact him until after the election on the day the team was dissolved. She did initially meet him on a hiking trail in an Oakland park, but aside from that, the movie’s account of how she became involved is very…
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