When The Social Network hit cinemas in 2010, it was reasonable to question whether the film had arrived too soon. Facebook had only been launched from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room a mere six years earlier, and there was still uncertainty surrounding how it would reshape the digital landscape in the decade ahead.
However, with Aaron Sorkin’s gripping screenplay, a haunting score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and Jesse Eisenberg’s meticulous portrayal of the young Zuckerberg, director David Fincher delivered a slick corporate thriller that encapsulated the era’s central drama: the tangled lawsuits over ownership stakes in the platform and the battle for the title of founder. It was an electrifying film that seemed to only slightly fictionalise the latest wave of Silicon Valley moguls.
Escalating Realities
Fast forward sixteen years, and Facebook has accrued more scandals than Hollywood could ever hope to keep track of. Sorkin reveals that over the years he has been approached multiple times for a sequel, yet struggled to find the right angle. “Before a film can be anything else, before it can be relevant or thought-provoking, it has to be good,” he insists. “It has to work as something you watch while eating popcorn.”
It was during this search that Sorkin encountered Frances Haugen, the former Facebook data engineer who leaked damning internal memos to investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz. Horwitz subsequently penned the “Facebook Files,” a comprehensive series of articles published in 2021 that exposed much of what the company knew about the harm inflicted on users, from hate speech and medical misinformation to body image issues and human trafficking. These were matters largely ignored amid the company’s relentless pursuit of growth.
Initially uncertain if there was enough material for a film, Sorkin was intrigued when Haugen shared her motivation for going to the media. “She told me quite spontaneously: ‘Oh, I had a friend who was radicalised because of Facebook after spending too many hours on the platform,'” he recalls. “And that’s how I began to shape what is now the opening scene of the movie.”
The Social Reckoning Unfolds
The opening scene of The Social Reckoning, which Sorkin both wrote and directed, depicts a drunken woman detained on the shoulder of a road in San Mateo, California, with her car overheating. When approached by police officers, she reacts aggressively, pulling out her phone to record a video while hurling racist insults at the officers, ultimately being arrested for threatening to kill one of them. This video later appears on a Facebook page dedicated to far-right content, where Haugen (played by Mikey Madison) discovers it in 2019, recognising the woman as an acquaintance from her Pilates class who once held progressive views. She also learns that this woman is a highly active “superuser” on Facebook.
Haugen initially attempts to make her Facebook colleagues aware of how their algorithms are pushing users, including her former friend, towards extremist content. It is only after encountering significant resistance that she reluctantly places her trust in Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a journalist whom Facebook staff are expressly forbidden to speak with. This sets the stage for a complex relationship marked by debates between two professionals driven by opposing ideals—Haugen aims to save the company from itself, while Horwitz suspects that it may already be too late. Meanwhile, flash-forwards show Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) rehearsing for a congressional hearing on social media misinformation in 2021, with a crisis PR consultant named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku) and a fictional former employee, Charlie (Bill Burr), hired to provoke him and dismantle his rehearsed arguments.
Narrative Choices and Structural Challenges
This narrative structure feels clumsier than the cross-cutting sequences of The Social Network, which adeptly allowed characters to recount Facebook’s beginnings without a guiding narrative. In contrast, The Social Reckoning is filled with grandiose intertitles (the first scene is labelled “Prologue”) and visual references to remind us where we are in the timeline. Despite incisive performances and Sorkin’s signature dialogue making for an engaging film, the pieces seem to fit together awkwardly, leaving one wishing for the rhythmic push that Reznor and Ross could have provided.
The film arrives amidst a slew of highly anticipated tech-related works, including Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a satire on the firing and rehiring of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, which generated considerable buzz when Amazon MGM pulled it this summer following a $50 billion deal between Amazon and OpenAI. There is also the epic documentary Musk, by Alex Gibney, chronicling the exploits of the world’s richest man through his tumultuous tenure as the “efficiency czar” in the White House. Additionally, You Can See Everything features directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim gaining privileged access to Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes shortly before her ten-year prison sentence commenced.
A Timely Yet Disconnected Perspective
Amid these timely offerings, The Social Reckoning feels somewhat out of sync. Its climax (spoiler alert) coincides with the January 6 Capitol riot, attributed in part to Facebook’s failure to manage conspiracy theories surrounding election fraud and its hesitance to ban Donald Trump while he spread incendiary falsehoods. As Trump embarks on his second term, is it truly a groundbreaking revelation that he and his movement feel emboldened by the complicity of tech oligarchs? The same ones who openly supported him in 2024.
Nonetheless, significant issues are at stake. The ongoing debate around ethics in technology continuously leads to distressing questions about how truth is negotiated and who ultimately holds the power to define it.
Catharsis or Disappointment?
Whether one considers Reckoning to be a profound analysis of these themes likely depends on their interest in what amounts to a cross between The Newsroom and The West Wing. There are striking moments designed to provoke audience catharsis, such as when Haugen accuses Horwitz of bias against technology for robbing journalists of their jobs, to which he retorts that it’s actually because “you’re really bad at it.” Or when Zuckerberg mocks his traitorous friend Charlie for selling his Facebook shares for $200 million instead of waiting until their value reached $1.3 billion, to which Charlie counters, dismantling the assumption that he should feel ashamed of that decision.
“I love that line because that’s the disease,” Burr tells us. “What we see in these ruthless magnates who roam free right now is that, like someone addicted to methamphetamine, they are addicted to money. They never have enough. They are insatiable. They behave like addicts. And an addict will do whatever it takes, hurt whoever it must, to get their next fix.”
It is undoubtedly satisfying to see Burr confront Zuckerberg with this observation. Yet it is somewhat naïve to imagine that such critiques would affect someone who is expanding his vast, secretive Hawaiian complex to include ancestral cemeteries. In many ways, Reckoning aims to shame a ruling class that has proven to be, well, shameless.
At its best, the film may highlight Haugen’s bravery in stepping forward as a whistleblower while accurately illustrating the challenges and dangers of investigating a Silicon Valley giant. It serves as a reminder that there is always more that these tech companies are hiding. Both Madison and White share that Sorkin’s script prompted them to reevaluate their understanding of the forces at play in the sector.
“I had a slight suspicion about certain things, but facing the statistics and the real facts really confirmed what I already thought about social media as a whole and some of the negative effects it can have on people,” Madison emphasises. White adds that people should not give companies like Meta the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong. “What you discover when watching this film is that there is a business model, there is a plan,” he highlights. “They are very aware of exactly what is happening, and yet they choose to floor the accelerator.”
However, when it comes to a genuine “reckoning” with this reality, the title may have promised more than it delivers. The film notes that millions of Americans continue to get their news through Facebook and that, by 2025, Meta had ended its fact-checking program, opting instead to seek contextual notes from users through crowdsourcing. It is a disheartening conclusion after Haugen and Horwitz have overcome numerous challenges to expose countless dirty secrets. One wishes to leave The Social Reckoning with the sense that this has changed Facebook, Zuckerberg, or the internet forever, but it is hard not to recognise that ultimately, they all seem to have gotten away with it.