It should have been a series.
That’s the biggest compliment I can possibly pay to Aaron Sorkin’s latest movie as writer/director, The Social Reckoning, the sequel to The Social Network, which opened in theaters around Israel on Thursday.
Although this sequel is also concerned with Facebook and how Mark Zuckerberg runs it, it has a very different tone and tells an urgent new story about the harmful uses of social media and the lack of oversight on the part of Facebook, which renamed itself Meta following the events portrayed in the film.
In fact, I felt that Sorkin - the most cerebral of modern filmmakers, who also wrote A Few Good Men and Moneyball and who directed The Trial of the Chicago 7 - could have said even more about the way profit-driven social-media giants manipulate their platforms, which is why I wish it could have been a series.
The Social Reckoning hearkens back to The West Wing, Sorkin’s series that made policy wonks cool and which, against all odds, made great television out of brainy presidential aides arguing among themselves and with the president about economic, social, and foreign policy issues.
The Social Reckoning portrays whistleblower's fight against Facebook's unchecked power
While The Social Reckoning is a wonderful David vs Goliath story about how a whistleblower exposed malignant trends on the Facebook and Instagram platforms that Zuckerberg runs, as the movie makes clear, it portrays just one battle in a war that is far from over.
In addition to its focus on how social media can be used to foster hate and extremism, it also showcases Sorkin’s brilliance at entertaining audiences.
This is not a lecture scolding us to walk away from our phones and keyboards and go for a walk in the woods, although some key scenes have the characters doing just that. Rather, it’s a suspenseful story that takes two of the main characters on a classic hero’s journey. Every moment is intense; many are very funny, and some lines will probably be quoted for years to come.
The Social Network, which was released in 2010, was about how Zuckerberg, played in that film by Jesse Eisenberg, an awkward, arrogant, and very young genius, created a platform that changed millions of lives, and which was so successful that many people wanted a piece of it.
Much of it focused on a trial challenging his ownership of the site. Eisenberg declined to reprise the role, and Jeremy Strong, best known for Succession and for playing the supremely unlikable lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, was cast.
Strong makes Zuckerberg into an almost diabolic character here, typified by his poker face as he shouts, “When I say no, that’s the end of the debate! I’m not two years out of a dorm room anymore.” The basically likable nerd at the heart of The Social Network is a distant memory.
Jeremy Allen White, Mikey Madison portray the reporter, whistleblower who exposed Facebook
But there are two new likable nerd main characters, who are also real people: Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White of The Bear and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere) and Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison, the Oscar-winning star of Anora), the whistleblower who gave Horwitz the material for his series of articles on Facebook and who eventually testified at a US Senate committee on social media in 2021.
Horwitz is portrayed as a crack investigative reporter who looks at social media and tech through an outsider’s eyes, preferring to watch old musicals and sports in his rare moments of downtime.
It’s precisely because he is not seduced by any of the fun Facebook can provide that he is able to analyze it so astutely.
“This company and that guy are playing an unprecedented role in our lives,” he tells his editors.
Haugen is a more complicated character, a techie who believes ardently in Facebook’s original iteration as a platform connecting people.
“Because some people are awkward, they get to be their best selves when they are alone at their keyboard,” she tells him, speaking for herself as well as for millions of users, and is reluctant at first to do more than give Horwitz a few scraps of information.
But there are multiple issues at Facebook that she finds disturbing, some of which are raised with Zuckerberg during his trial prep.
These include internal studies that proved that Facebook executives knew there was evidence that Instagram (which Facebook owns) was causing harm to the mental health of teens.
The Social Reckoning examines how Facebook's algorithms fueled online extremism
In addition, the movie contends that Facebook executives were aware that the platform was used by drug cartels and human traffickers; that Facebook did not fact-check political ads, which often fanned the fires of extremism and led to political violence; and that an algorithm change in 2018 prioritized re-shares over liking posts. Haugen and the movie posit that this algorithm change led to people being offered more extremist content, since research and common sense show that people tend to re-share posts that make them angry.
The latter two problems come together as Zuckerberg’s trial prep is interrupted by the insurrection in January 2021 in which extremists, denying the presidential election results, stormed the Capitol, after US President Donald Trump urged them to march to the building to protest via Facebook.
He used the platform hours later to urge them to retreat, but by then, much damage had been done. Trump is never mentioned by name, however. The movie is not an anti-Trump screed. Sorkin keeps his eye on the prize, which is sparking a debate about social-media ethics that will transcend the influence of any one figure.
While Horwitz and Haugen ultimately work together, they debate each other in the kind of exchanges that made people love The West Wing, showing smart people who don’t agree arguing.
Bill Burr's character serves as a foil to Zuckerberg ahead of Senate hearing
Zuckerberg also needs a character foil, and he gets one in Charlie (Bill Burr), a former Facebook employee whom Zuckerberg feels betrayed the company by writing a critical op-ed. Nevertheless, a crisis manager (Wunmi Mosaku of Sinners) brings Charlie in to help with witness prep before the Senate hearing.
In the key exchange in the movie, Zuckerberg lays out his position on why Facebook and Instagram should not police content: “People can post what they want. We’re not the ref. We’re the public square.” Charlie replies: “You’re like a crossing guard standing in front of a school, but you’re not doing anything with your arms. So the cars are just plowing down the children.”
A major part of what makes the movie work is the talented cast. Strong has never been better, and the other Jeremy in the cast, Jeremy Allen White, proves that in his low-key way, he has become a big-time movie star. He’s likable but also holds the screen in every scene he’s in, and I can’t imagine any other actor giving such an appealing performance in this part.
Mikey Madison manages an about-face from the role as a lap dancer in Anora that made her a star and is mostly convincing as an earnest data scientist. Sorkin can be forgiven for having her dress in slinky, body-hugging dresses that remind us of her Anora character in certain scenes, under the pretext that she wants it to look as if she is out on a date.
At times, the debates between Horwitz and Haugen sound a bit contrived, and the movie struggles with its pacing and the fact that, going in, we pretty much know the ending. But these are minor flaws.
I admit I was predisposed to like the movie, because I’m a sucker for any drama that ends with the presses rolling, like All the President’s Men and Spotlight.
While The Social Reckoning is fun, it’s more than just entertainment. This isn’t exactly a spoiler, but one of the end titles presents the statistic that 43% of adults get their news from social media, even five years after the events that this film depicts.
That should be sobering news; and more than any movie you are likely ever going to see, The Social Reckoning explains how we got to this world we are currently living in, where people who would never say American artists should be boycotted because of Trump’s ICE policies feel that all Israelis should be banned from every industry because of the war in Gaza.
Hamas's October 7 attacks highlight social media's role in spreading terrorist violence
I am writing this review on the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre, and I cannot forget how Hamas terrorists uploaded clips of much of what they did that day onto social media platforms and even live-streamed some of the murders they committed to their victims’ Facebook pages.
When terrorists use social media as a tool to publicize their murders, and then receive widespread support, even veneration, in the West, a line has been crossed, and Sorkin’s metaphor of the crossing guard who does nothing explains it as clearly as anything can.
Sorkin clearly designed this movie to spark discussions that will help us fight the destructive influence these platforms have had on so many people’s lives, and I think it will succeed.
I only hope he has notes for future sequels, perhaps on TikTok and AI.