The Social Reckoning: When Algorithms, Tech Bros and Whistleblowers Collide

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

Is it a spoiler to reveal that Facebook is kind of evil, founder Mark Zuckerberg is kind of a scumbag, and The Social Reckoning pivots almost entirely on those points?

This follow-up of sorts to The Social Network, 2010’s brilliant origin story — both written by Aaron Sorkin, who here also directs in place of David Fincher — dramatizes an explosive recent real-life chapter in the platform’s history.

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal, working with a company insider named Frances Haugen, published an expose of Facebook’s nefarious, undisclosed means of keeping people on the site, ethics be damned, which led Facebook to a very public showdown with the U.S. government.

What The Social Reckoning doesn’t do is add much dimension to a story that is organically horrifying, was widely covered and, with the advent of AI and the company’s hard political swing to the right, is likely to become even more alarming in the days ahead. So maybe it’s best to think of the film as an amuse bouche to an inevitable incoming smorgasbord of doom.

The film focuses on Haugen (Mikey Madison), an upstanding member of Facebook’s civic integrity team, tasked with monitoring the site for propaganda and other slop. Haugen was born to the role, admitting that the basic premise of the site genuinely inspired her. And so, its manufactured, for-profit wickedness proved especially dispiriting.

When Facebook arbitrarily dissolved the civic integrity team in 2020 — effectively removing the kinds of mis-informational guardrails that, the film heavy-handedly shows in its final third, fueled the January 6 riot on the U.S. capitol while deeply enriching itself — Haugen was galvanized. She decided to blow the whistle on its underhanded tactics while still on the inside with access to classified documents.

Haugen had a personal stake in the outcome. A friend had been politically radicalized by the site, the demonstration of which opens the film in a shaggy dog sort of way before a more conventional narrative trajectory takes over, tracing Haugen’s meetings with WSJ reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and the pair’s various tribulations in covertly gathering the evidence needed to publish their hair-raising story.

So, The Social Reckoning is a straight-up political thriller but with fact-based gravitas and, weirdly, gratuitous cleavage. In one scene, Haugen arrives at a hotel to meet Horwitz wearing a slinky number, the ostensible uniform of a (presumably very hot) date lest she encounter any fellow FB employees and needs an alibi. Um, sure.

As the film moves back and forth between 2018 and 2021, Facebook honcho Zuckerberg is seen alternately being rehearsed ahead of the hearings he will face in the fallout from the WSJ report and commanding his underlings at FB HQ to deploy algorithms, many not very nice at all, to rack up profitable likes and shares.

As Zuckerberg, a stone-faced Jeremy Strong summons the same iciness marshalled by Jesse Eisenberg in the first film, adding a hard exterior shell one would expect from a beleaguered billionaire brainiac utterly sheltered from the masses his creation has both beguiled and ensnared, for better or worse.

This being a Sorkin screenplay, there’s abundant snappy dialogue carried with commitment and verve by an excellent cast including North of North’s Anna Lambe as Haugen’s wary data engineer colleague who eventually abets the expose, comedian-writer Bill Burr as the one non-sycophant on Zuckerberg’s legal team, and Betty Gilpin as Horwitz’s exceedingly droll publisher.

Interestingly, Sorkin chose to recreate the violent January 6 riot scenes (in Vancouver where the film was shot) rather than use actual footage, apparently to sidestep potential political sinkholes. As he explained to Variety, he likewise steered clear of mentioning Trump or MAGA, saying, "The movie is about Facebook’s role and the rise of divisiveness, extremism, and hyper-partisanship in the country. It is not a red-blue thing, even though, obviously, it will be felt that way.”

Alas, Sorkin was unable to persuade Eisenberg to reprise his Zuckerberg role, though he tried, confirming to Variety that it wasn't a money issue. For his part, Eisenberg is quoted as saying, “I don’t want to be associated with that character but all of my reasons for not wanting to do the movie have nothing to do with how wonderful the movie is, and will be, and I’m sure is already.”

That casting would have been novel to observe even if it’s doubtful the final product would have been any more revelatory. Despite its many strengths, The Social Reckoning shows that it’s very hard to out-chill a genuinely chilling story playing out in real time in the headlines and seemingly getting more shadowy by the day.

Any lingering gleam in our collective eye way back in 2010 — when social media still, maybe, seemed like a thrilling new frontier for benevolent togetherness? — has been thoroughly extinguished by Sorkin, and reality, here in 2026.

The Social Reckoning. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Starring Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr and Jeremy Strong. In theatres October 9.