How to reckon with Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook follow-up The Social Reckoning
The film itself is like a social media feed: a shout into the void that throws out a bunch of news links and clever references, none of it terribly new or interesting. But hey, at least it’s fact-checked.
Courtesy Sony Pictures
The Social Reckoning opens with a white woman (Portia Doubleday) being approached on the side of a highway by a pair of cops. The cops (Nathan Witte and Crystal Balint) are Black. What starts as a routine interaction (she’s waiting for AAA to tow her overheating car; the officers stop to make sure she’s okay) escalates when the cops realize the woman is drunk. The woman goes from defensive to belligerent. She starts shouting slurs. Then, she turns on her phone and goes live on Facebook. We later learn this unnamed character wasn’t always this way. She volunteered for progressive causes.
She was nice. What happened?
Aaron Sorkin’s spiritual sequel to 2010’s The Social Network tackles the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Facebook’s poor regulation that led to dangerous political radicalization, including the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The same reporting also led to the recent massive addiction and mental health lawsuit against Facebook, resulting in a $17.1 billion settlement.
The Social Reckoning is part journalism thriller, part war room drama, switching between its two main plots.
In one, Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) works with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) to uncover proof that Facebook’s “meaningful social interaction”-based algorithm led users toward extremist political groups. In the other, Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) prepares for a congressional hearing on online free speech regulation that’s interrupted by the January 6 attacks.
Sorkin is concerned about the right things: online radicalization and degrading mental health through social media use. He is, unfortunately, concerned about those issues in a very Aaron Sorkin way, which is to say preachy and generally annoyed that people don’t care about old movies and classical literature enough.
This is a movie where you know who the good guys are because they know the difference between “conscious” and “conscientious,” can reference Antigone and know what the Pentagon Papers are, despite being millennials or younger. If you happen to know a gainfully employed straight guy in his late 30s who loves both basketball and the 1951 movie Show Boat, please let him know that he is an absolute unicorn, and that I am available.
The Zuckerberg-focused portion of the film fares scarcely better, with Strong’s CEO yelling at folks like Bill Burr’s Charlie—an ex-Facebook investor with Big Concerns over its fact-checking practices—for suggesting he should either end political ads on the platform or invest in ensuring their accuracy. Burr is our voice of reason, jumping in on Zuckerberg’s congressional practice run to ask why he lets alt-right groups and conspiracy theorists post with abandon.
Sorkin is, once again, preaching to a choir largely made up of people for whom none of this information will be surprising.
Part of what made The Social Network an instant classic was its character work, taking what was part of the record at that time and speculating on what kind of person would do or say those things. By now, we know exactly what kind of person Mark Zuckerberg is, and what drives his choices as a corporate leader with outsized wealth and influence. It’s the same thing that drives everyone else: Money.
Courtesy Sony Pictures
The Social Reckoning also oversimplifies the main problem: You don’t go from progressive cause volunteer to alt-right banshee because an algorithm led you down a primrose path. You get there through poor critical thinking skills. In one moment, Burr’s Charlie tells Zuckerberg he needs to realize how gullible people actually are, but it barely registers. The almighty algorithm here, as it so often is, gets illustrated as an instant poison rather than the reality: a system designed to reinforce what it thinks you want to see.
So, does The Social Reckoning work as a movie? Kinda.
White and Madison have a Capra-esque chemistry, and the journalism scenes have a righteous momentum that’s fun to watch (it helps that a playful Alexandre Desplat score undergirds it). Burr’s retorts to Strong seem preachy, but they do clarify information to make sure even the folks at the back of the room are getting it.
Like so many recent Sorkin projects, however, The Social Reckoning is weak sauce that’s unnecessarily proud of itself for doing the bare minimum. Oddly, it’s not unlike a social media feed: a shout into the void that throws out a bunch of news links and clever references, none of it terribly new or interesting. But hey, at least it’s fact-checked.
