It is a perilous undertaking to tell the history of the present while it is still unfolding. Harder still to make a gripping narrative out of a story whose ending is unknown. The Social Reckoning (written and directed by Aaron Sorkin) tries to give the diffuse reality of social media the structure of a traditional movie plot, with a beginning and end, good guys and bad guys.
This worked well enough in 2010 with The Social Network (directed by David Fincher but written by Sorkin), an origin story of Facebook and a biopic of its then very young CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). The movie reveled in the irony that the so-called social network was the brainchild of a socially awkward college nerd, a brilliant boy-man who destroyed his only friendships in an effort to make the whole world friends online. It closed with a prophetic vision of the loneliness that might await us all as we retreat into the private, sanitized bubbles of our screens.
What an innocent worry that seems now—as though loneliness were the worst that might befall us. From its perch a mere 16 years later, The Social Reckoning is way past debates about social isolation. It sets its sights on more explicit evils: criminals openly using Facebook to traffic drugs and humans, the exponential rise of teenage mental health crises and suicide due to social media, political radicalization that threatens fair elections and trust in democracy, and the spread of misinformation and outright lies, even from the highest branches of government. These aren’t just the result of bad actors exploiting a neutral technology. Facebook’s leaders knowingly rely on algorithms that drive people to extremist groups; they refuse to monitor disinformation; they are aware of the effects on teenage girls but have done little to mitigate them.
This is all part of the public record, well documented in court papers and mainstream newspapers. But the movie wagers that most of us haven’t really grasped the extent of Facebook’s bad acting, the degree to which it knew it was rending the fabric of our social life but just kept pulling at the seams. So it dramatizes this bad acting through the real-life story of Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a data scientist and eventual whistleblower who revealed the profit-over-people policies inside the tech behemoth, and Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke a series of stories based on Haugen’s information in 2021. The tension in the plot is Haugen’s moral wrestling: Will she or won’t she break her nondisclosure agreement and reveal the company’s actions? In a parallel storyline we see a still socially awkward Zuckerberg (now played by Jeremy Strong) preparing for congressional testimony, interspersed with board meetings and internal memos and public rollouts told in nonlinear flashbacks which are meant to create a sense of dramatic revelation—who knew what, when?
It is hard to pinpoint the reason why telling the story through Haugen’s experience doesn’t work as a coherent narrative. But the movie feels scattered and emotionally inert. Maybe this is because watching people search the internet, look at laptops, and conduct bureaucratic policy meetings is not that gripping. Maybe it is because we so expect corporations to act against the public interest in the name of profit that even when they do so on a massive scale, it is hard to feel shocked.
I think one reason is that the harms in question—radicalization, mental illness, disinformation—are presented as intellectual ideas, distant from the lives swept up in their grip. The movie tries to humanize these ideas with a half-hearted story of political radicalization and a two-minute vignette about online bullying, but there is no sense of the messy, complex, violent yearnings that can so easily be manipulated and misdirected. No curiosity about the longings for community and connection that propel people to keep going even as the algorithm continues to do its work. The characters at the heart of the movie seem to exist outside the forces that are overthrowing everyone else’s lives. It is hard not to feel like they are lecturing the masses from afar—or speaking only to the rarified few who have managed to stay out of the undertow.
But the larger problem with The Social Reckoning is that nothing has been reckoned with. Unlike other David versus Goliath stories—the fall of Big Tobacco or justice on a smaller scale in Erin Brockovich’s story—there is no comeuppance for the bad guys. In the rolling credits at the end of the movie, where we might learn what justice was meted out, what price Facebook had to pay, what regulations were enacted, we are told instead that Facebook has changed nothing. It has not slowed down or course corrected, not one little bit. We are also told how many times Haugen testified and in front of how many different bodies in the United States and Europe.
In the film itself, when we witness her testimony to Congress, the bright lights illuminate her face. She is speaking her truth, finally, after all her prevaricating. The victory is her personal victory. But Haugen has no real power to change anything. All the politicians are obscured in semidarkness, faceless and voiceless. They say and do nothing.
As she exits the courtroom, Haugen pumps her fist in the air, a callback to an earlier scene when she talked about wanting to feel happy about even one thing in her life. She is not a fist-pumping kind of gal, and it is a half-hearted gesture, a midway pump that barely reaches the top of head. It is hard not to feel like this is a metaphor for the whole movie. It wants to make us feel a victory. But the story of big tech and social media’s impact on our lives is far from over, and it is not at all clear who will triumph.
