The Social Reckoning

 

According to Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed it, The Social Reckoning is not, as such, a sequel to his 2010 The Social Network, which chronicled the problematic birth of Facebook. Strictly speaking, perhaps, it is not.  Yet Sorkin also has said it “never occurred” to him that Jesse Eisenberg wouldn’t want to reprise the role of Mark Zuckerberg, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination in 2010. For his part, Eisenberg apparently no longer wants “to be associated with that character.” Instead, the billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook is played by Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in HBO's Succession and Roy Cohn in the 2024 film The Apprentice. So we are already used to Strong playing unlikable, unsympathetic people very well, something he does again here in this movie. He is not, however, the main figure in the film.

The Social Network focused on the founding of Facebook and on the damage done to Zuckerberg personally and to his friendship with Eduardo Saverin. Sequel or not, The Social Reckoning, released this week, focuses more broadly on the damage done to our wider world by social media, damage to us as individuals and to American society more broadly. The Social Reckoning dramatizes the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook data scientist, who leaked photos of the company's internal documents to Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a political reporter newly covering the intersection of politics with technology for The Wall Street Journal, who used the inside information to write "the Facebook Files." The leak suggested that Facebook knew its platforms spread misinformation, encourage radicalization, and possibly harm teens' mental health, but did little to fix it, thus exposing the megacompany's allegedly willful damage to society.

Horwitz is portrayed, almost comically, as technologically ignorant, even about how to use GPS. Haugen has to explain everything to him. She starts out as a true believer in Facebook's "mission," but is disillusioned by some of her actual experiences at the company and, above all, by the radicalization of a former friend. The extremely effective scenes of interactions between Horwitz and Haugen are very human and provide some relief from the film's super serious and somewhat depressing theme. The film jumps around chronologically. There is the Horwiz and Haugen story, but also a Zuckerberg story (which includes images of January 6), and both take place at different times. But the fashionable technique of going back and forth in time is made less challenging and difficult for the viewer by a timeline which conveniently appears on the screen at various points, thus clarifying what is happening and when.

The film highlights the perennial problem of how hard it can be to do anything about extreme concentrations of economic, technological, cultural, and political  power in unaccountable corporations and unaccountable individuals - especially in a country increasingly oligarchical and post-political.

Apart from sharing these postings, at this point I use Facebook primarily to wish friends a Happy Birthday. It frightens me to learn that some 43% of the American public relies on Facebook to get their news!