‘The Social Reckoning’ Review: Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison Go to War With Mark Zuckerberg’s Hate Machine

This isn’t a Frank Capra movie,” Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) tells Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) during one of their many clandestine meetings. “I didn’t think you knew who Capra was,” Jeff replies. A Wall Street Journal reporter investigating Facebook’s questionable practices, he spends what little free time he has watching classic Hollywood movies. “I’ve seen his two movies,” Frances says, presumably referring to It Happened One Night (1934) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). She works at Facebook and is the reporter’s main source, someone who knows the company’s practices firsthand and, more importantly, has access to its internal documents. “He made a lot of other movies,” Jeff tells her. “Not just those two.”

The reference is no coincidence. Horwitz doesn’t mention them, but he could just as easily be talking about Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) or Meet John Doe (1941), perhaps Capra’s most overtly political films. These are the classic stories of the “little guy” taking on the powerful, often featuring stirring speeches delivered before large audiences—in Congress or a courtroom—and the frequently Pyrrhic victory of an ordinary person who dares to challenge corruption. In his own way, Aaron Sorkin is trying to place The Social Reckoning within this nearly century-old tradition, showing how the worlds of high politics and big business continue to manipulate ordinary people’s lives, albeit through different means.

Frances, however, is hardly an ordinary Facebook user. Her friends are. What gradually pushes her to reveal the algorithmic secrets of the company she works for is watching one of them—in a harrowing scene shown near the beginning of the film—transform from a young progressive into a fervent supporter of the far right. The ideological shift is no accident, and Frances knows it. She understands the mechanisms that have “converted” her friend. But even though she works in Facebook’s Civic Integrity department, nobody at the company pays the slightest attention to her concerns. Nobody there wants to listen—not least Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong)—to people who might throw a wrench into the works or try to put limits on the business for the sake of their “conscience.”

Set between 2019 and 2021, and inspired by a real investigation despite the many changes made for dramatic purposes, the film follows Frances as she eventually reaches out to Horwitz, one of the few investigative journalists who still seem to be working at increasingly depleted traditional print newspapers. She is the only one who comes forward, and from this tentative, reluctant connection, the reporter—and, by extension, the audience—begins to unravel how Facebook and the other platforms owned by the same company, including Instagram and WhatsApp, have increasingly favored what is commonly known as “hate speech”: aggressive, violent and often false content that generates far more engagement than anything else. Users spend more and more time liking and sharing this material, which consistently outperforms more conventional posts about births, weddings and birthdays, the kind of content that originally fueled the company’s growth.

The film follows the structure of an investigative thriller in the tradition of All the President’s Men, though with a more corporate than political focus and considerably less risk to the lives of those involved. Alongside the evolving relationship between Frances and Jeff, and the secrets she uncovers and shares with him, Sorkin eventually shifts his attention to Zuckerberg himself as he prepares for one of his many public appearances before Congress. He is coached to come across as a little more human than he normally does. It is clearly an uphill battle, made even harder by two events that Sorkin stretches coincidence to bring together: the imminent publication of Horwitz’s investigation and a little political disturbance that took place at the Capitol in January 2021, one in which social media platforms like Facebook played not only a major role but, in a sense, helped incite the violence.

The Social Reckoning works as a sort of sequel to The Social Network, the film Sorkin wrote and David Fincher directed in 2010, when Facebook was just getting started and beginning to emerge as a dominant cultural force. This story takes place a little over a decade later, but in some respects it already feels dated. Donald Trump’s return to power over the past few years, and the freedom he has given social media companies to exercise virtually no control over what gets posted on their platforms, along with the rise of artificial intelligence and the new problems it has created, leave the film feeling like a snapshot of an earlier moment. The story is steeped in the pandemic and the misinformation that circulated during it, a period when the world began to experience firsthand the destructive power of Facebook’s promotion of fake news and Instagram’s endless stream of aggressive content, with all the consequences that followed.

Sorkin is a better screenwriter than director, and the film suffers from the absence of a filmmaker capable of bringing kinetic energy to its scenes. He tends to fall in love with his own dialogue, and at times his characters stop feeling like flesh-and-blood people and become mouthpieces for ideas, intelligent talking machines with little connection to the real world. In their own different ways, all three of The Social Reckoning’s main characters are alienated, absorbed in their own investigations, data or profits. In Zuckerberg’s case, this is even more apparent because of Jeremy Strong’s excessively mimetic performance. At times, the film itself falls into the same fishbowl effect. We see the January 2021 unrest and hear about the misinformation surrounding the pandemic, but these events rarely feel entirely real. In fact, the film doesn’t even name names. The words “Donald Trump” are never uttered, nor are the names of any of the other figures involved in these events, apart from Zuckerberg himself.

Beyond these limitations, which keep The Social Reckoning from becoming anything more than a conventional exposé —Fincher’s absence, or that of another director with a sharper cinematic sensibility, is keenly felt— Sorkin does manage to engage viewers through the specific revelations his film offers about Facebook’s practices and those of other social media platforms. While this information will already be familiar to anyone who has followed how these companies operate, the film serves to underscore how Facebook manipulated its users by amplifying aggressive and false content that generates ever more engagement. And why the company has absolutely no interest in stopping.