The Social Reckoning review

The Social Reckoning is very good for most of its running time, but Aaron Sorkin pushes it toward an ending that doesn’t do justice to the more interesting movie he’s already made. I enjoyed it, and there’s a lot here worth seeing and talking about. I just don’t buy all of the framing, especially once everything starts turning on January 6.

Sorkin wrote and directed this companion to The Social Network, with Mikey Madison playing Frances Haugen, the Facebook employee who passed internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White. Those documents became the basis of the Facebook Files investigation in 2021. Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg, and he gets the weirdness down very specifically. He’s unnerving, but there’s also something almost sympathetic about watching him struggle to interact like a normal human being. Whether that performance works for you will probably affect how you feel about the movie.

Madison is very good as this extremely intelligent woman trying to get someone to understand what the company already knows about its own products. White is good opposite her, and the two have enough chemistry that their scenes kept suggesting a romance. They spend so much time together in apartments and hotel rooms that it feels like something is developing, even though that’s not the story being told. I’m not suggesting they should have invented a relationship, but it’s an interesting casting choice: their chemistry makes those scenes engaging while also creating an expectation the movie isn’t going to fulfill.

The most compelling part is the distinction between allowing people to say things and building a system that actively pushes people toward destructive material. The movie shows a company whose internal research warns about polarization, extremism and harm to young users, while its business incentives keep pushing it toward more engagement. The problem isn’t simply that extremists can find one another on Facebook. It’s that the recommendation system can steer ordinary users toward increasingly extreme content because keeping them engaged is good for business.

That’s why Zuckerberg’s free-speech argument feels evasive in this context. There are people who want Facebook to decide what’s true and police everyone’s speech, and I understand why he resists that. I don’t particularly want the government or a corporation deciding the correct version of every political argument, either. But that doesn’t answer the question of what Facebook itself chooses to promote. You can object to censorship and still ask why an algorithm is steering people toward material the company’s own research says is harmful.

The movie explains that distinction pretty well, which makes its eventual turn toward January 6 frustrating. It starts narrowing all of these problems into an argument about Facebook’s responsibility for that day, and I think it loses some of its force. I don’t dispute that Facebook was used to organize and spread material surrounding January 6. I just don’t accept the weight of responsibility the movie assigns it. Those groups already existed, the president made his own choices, and plenty of other people and institutions were involved. I don’t like Facebook as a company, but I don’t need to make it primarily responsible for January 6 to think its conduct deserves scrutiny.

Some of the friends I watched this with disagreed, and that’s fine. To me, the stronger story was already there in what Facebook knew about its products and the damage it was willing to tolerate. Bringing everything around to January 6 makes the ending depend on accepting a particular political argument when the earlier material stands on its own.

That leads into my other problem with the ending: it treats Haugen’s congressional testimony like a momentous accomplishment that produced a meaningful reckoning. They even have her doing a fist pump on the way out, as though exposing the story means they won. But the truth is that nothing meaningful came of it. Congress didn’t change Section 230 or impose the accountability the movie spends two hours building toward. Trump was eventually reelected. Facebook rebranded as Meta, its stock took a hit for a while, and then the company recovered and moved on.

Rather than moving toward more oversight of what people were posting, Facebook went in the opposite direction. Zuckerberg had resisted fact-checking political advertisements, and eventually Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the United States altogether. So the idea that this exposure forced the company to change course doesn’t hold up for me. Five years later, it’s a trillion-dollar company again, and we’re still living with the world these platforms helped create.

The reporting was important, and the procedural story of Haugen working with the Wall Street Journal was fascinating. But breaking the story didn’t fix the problem. Congress didn’t bring Facebook to account, the company moved past the controversy, and the rest of us are still dealing with the radicalization and the political mess. Ending with a sense of victory lets everyone feel like something was accomplished. I think the more honest ending would have left us with the fact that we exposed all of this, knew what was happening, and kept right on going.

I recommend the movie. The performances are strong, the reporting story holds your attention, and it gives you plenty to argue about afterward. I just think it should have ended on a much more downbeat, even despondent note. The uncomfortable part is how much of this world we’re still living in, and I wanted the movie to leave us with that.