How Facebook Broke America
The Bulwark · C · trust 40/100
‘The Social Network’ revealed a man's hollowness. ‘The Social Reckoning’ shows how he filled that hole: with ragebait.
Sonny Bunch October 9 Upgrade to listen 13 minute s 237 11 26 October Surprise: 30% OFF Bulwark+ for a year. Upgrade now. Jeremy Strong and Bill Burr in The Social Reckoning . (Courtesy Sony Pictures) IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP to the release of The Odyssey , and then in the weeks after, I noticed a weird thing. Whenever I tweeted something about Christopher Nolan’s film, it would rack up huge numbers. Big engagement, tons of likes, lots of views. It was getting sucked into the algorithm like few topics I regularly tweeted about.
It quickly became obvious that The Odyssey had been juiced by Elon’s algo because it had become a vector of anger and disinformation. Arguments raged over the nature of the translation by Emily Wilson that Nolan referenced in interviews about the film, whether it was woke or wrong or whatever. (Many obscure experts in ancient Greek were uncovered during those months, I tell you.) Racists were apoplectic that a beautiful black woman would dare be cast as Helen of Troy and her twin sister Clytemnestra. (No black woman could possibly be the offspring of Zeus, in the form of a swan, and a human.) And false rumors swirled around the character being played by Elliot Page. (“A trans man? Playing Achilles? What about Brad Pitt and his gauzy linen? When did he stop being the masculine ideal?”)
Now, the South African émigré who now owns Twitter undoubtedly had an ideological reason for hyping rage about the race of Helen of Troy and the genitals of the actor (not) playing Achilles. (Turns out Page was playing Sinon. Oops!) But the primary goal was undoubtedly something much simpler. The angrier people were and the angrier they got—either because of the casting or the blatant misinformation surrounding the casting—the more time they spent on the platform. The more they shared tweets. The more traffic they drove to the site. The more advertising revenue was generated. The more usage Grok got.
The Social Reckoning , Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network , asks how we got here. It is not about Twitter or The Odyssey , of course. It’s about Facebook and how it fueled the January 6th insurrection that attempted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
These are, arguably, higher stakes than what trolls think about Lupita Nyong’o’s acting choices.
Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning . (Courtesy Sony Pictures) TO SET THE ARTISTIC STAKES, first and foremost: The Social Reckoning is not as good as The Social Network , simply on a visual level. And that’s because Aaron Sorkin, a massively talented writer of screenplays and play-plays and teleplays, is not a massively talented visual filmmaker. Not incompetent, mind you; not embarrassing. But The Social Network was directed by David Fincher, meaning that it had his painterly eye for composition and was lit in a way that felt both dramatic and real. Just one quick example: There’s this great sequence of a regatta in The Social Network that uses tilt-shift photography to make the whole thing look like a miniature recreation, a toy for the wealthy to amuse themselves.
Aaron Sorkin does not even attempt something as interesting as this image. Nor should he. It’s not his skillset. He’s a writer of words, not a painter of pictures. This is a pretty locked-down movie, for the most part, occasionally veering into handheld black and white during flashback scenes or vivid action during the storming of the Capitol by the goons supporting Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The Social Network was a piece of psychoanalysis and everything Fincher did was designed to demonstrate that Mark Zuckerberg had a hole in his soul he hoped to fill with love and admiration. He desired acceptance.
The Social Reckoning , on the other hand, is one part journalism procedural, one part detective story, one part courtroom drama. The detective story involves Frances Haugen’s (Mikey Madison) effort to uncover why one of her friends—whom she knew as a San Francisco progressive taking spin classes—filmed herself getting into a racist confrontation with cops and then posted it to Facebook as if it made her look good. She is on Facebook’s Civic Integrity Team: a true believer in the power of social media, albeit one who puts the ethics of connecting the world ahead of pure engagement.
The journalism procedural follows Jeff Horwitz’s (Jeremy Allen White) effort to uncover how Facebook is manipulating the discourse. He gets in touch with Frances after discerning that the company is censoring comments on Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jeremy Strong) posts. These are small potatoes. The real issue, she says, is that 64 percent of people who join extremist groups on Facebook do so directly due to algorithmic prodding by the platform. They are recommended membership in QAnon, militias, and other degenerate groups by Facebook itself. When Horwitz and his interns set up a test profile, the number of days it takes to get a recommendation to join a white-power group is just ten. The question is: why?
And this is where the courtroom drama kicks in. Not technically a trial, though, as Zuckerberg is preparing for congressional testimony in early January 2021. The morning of January 6, 2021, as it happens. He’s peppered with questions by Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), a crisis-comms professional who wants to make sure he understands how to react in a polite and semi-human manner to the senators asking him why his platforms are so bad for society. Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr) heckles him from the sideline with pointed asides about political advertisements and the lack of fact-checking on the platform. Yes, engagement is through the roof, but at what cost?
Hey, if you like your news and analysis without algorithmic fiddling, ragebait, or billionaire overlords deciding what you should see, consider…
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