Facebook Is on Trial Again in ‘The Social Reckoning’

Whistle. Blown. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning preaches its speeches with the smug ballast of hindsight, an insistent klaxon moralizing about settled fact. Its play-by-play recreation of the investigative reporting that revealed Facebook’s radicalizing algorithms feels like a too-little, too-late lesson in soapbox righteousness. It’s an urgent expose of common knowledge.

The Social Reckoning ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Aaron Sorkin
Written by: Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen
Running time:  112 mins

Which isn’t to say that Sorkin’s docudrama doesn’t pop with clever conversations and shocking statistics. The film’s oxygen is outrage, and it delivers pure hits of clarifying highs — especially when it shows how Facebook enriched its corporate earnings by promoting fringe groups and fomenting hate speech, pushing its users into divisive tribalism.

Weirdo founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong, in autistic-disconnect overdrive) bristles when his company’s Civic Integrity Team recommends sacrificing 1% less engagement for a 38% reduction in civil misinformation. His response: tweak the code so people stay on the platform even longer, which leads to a 50% increase in the number of content re-shares.

It also means that 64% of new members joining extremist groups come from Facebook recommendations. Don’t fact-check political ads, don’t throttle the rage bait. “We’re not the ref, we’re the public square,” he says, framing himself as the free speech absolutist while staking claim as the money-is-everything multi-billionaire. The debate is over!” he robo-barks.

Mousy integrity team member Frances Haugen (Mike Madison, switching gears from Oscar-winning sex worker to demure coding nerd) gets troubled when she sees a Facebook post from a once-progressive friend who videotapes herself going full Karen on two traffic cops. When Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horowitz (Jeremy Allen White, putting soulful eyes on a wonky role) suspects foul play at Facebook and cold-emails all the 100+ Civic Integrity Team coders, Frances ends up getting in touch with him and leaking the stats. “I like Facebook,” she says. “I believe in our mission.” She hopes that calling out the company will force it to course-correct. Which, of course, is insane, since her paranoid boss already has a ballistic couch and a bullet-proof computer monitor.

Fans of Sorkin as the much-beloved wordsmith will thrill to snappy, hyperliterate dialogue spoken by characters with eccentric traits — unless you’re a critic of his self-congratulatory pontifications, in which case you will chaff at snappy, hyperliterate dialogue spoken by characters with eccentric traits. Horowitz is a tech reporter who loves show tunes and doesn’t know how to use his GPS! Haugen constantly wears leg warmers and fingerless wool gloves because she has neuropathy! Zuckerberg refuses to pick a necktie color! None of these empty flourishes have much bearing on the story, so they stick out as flattened stabs at adding depth to these two-dimensional portraits.

Worst of all, The Social Reckoning comes to a head with the presumably Facebook-fueled January 6th attack on the Capitol and Haugen’s subsequent tell-all testimony to Congress. Problem solved, right? Riiight? The film’s original sin is its timing; Sorkin treats these hot-take revelations as something that a Trump-weary public will still be galled to hear.

At least All The President’s Men, Hollywood’s far more illustrious ode to gumshoe journalism, came out only 20 months after Nixon resigned, and felt like a still-fresh summary statement — a glamorous coda to that long national nightmare. The Social Reckoning, on the other hand, concludes in 2021, more than five years ago. Compare that to its thrillingly superior predecessor The Social Network, which climaxes in 2009, just a year before the film’s 2010 release.

That celebrated classic, also written by Sorkin but directed by the more mischievously nihilistic David Fincher, endures because it’s such a riveting a portrait of sociopathic behavior and human betrayal. The Social Network examines an amoral protagonist devolving into moral rot. The Social Reckoning grandstands about that de-evolution, less interested in its characters’ development and more content to let them be a cipher for our indignation.

Adding accidental insult to injury is Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming Christmas release Artificial, a superior zeitgeist Silicon Valley monster movie starring a shape-shifting Sam Altman that shifts gears from hilarious to harrowing as it chronicles the rise and rise of OpenAI. The film’s unshakable real-time relevance makes Sorkin’s message movie seem like a dusty screed. Then again, 43% of adults still get their news from Facebook. Maybe The Social Reckoning isn’t so outdated quite yet.