The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's latest jab at Big Tech, is conceived as a political and social prosecution of Facebook.
The social network and its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, in the movie's view, are responsible for the spread of misinformation, the decline of journalism, the polarization of the electorate, and the radicalization of specific individuals who go on to commit heinous acts of anti-democratic violence. In its final moments, the film strongly implies that Facebook and its engagement-boosting algorithms are directly responsible for the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump, the election-losing president whose incendiary speech and repeated falsehoods about the results of the 2020 election preceded the riot, is never named in the movie. In a movie that positions itself as bold and brave, it's an omission of stunning, and revealing, cowardice.
To bring Trump into the picture would have complicated Sorkin's just-so story, in which Facebook's refusal to fact-check political ads and decision to boost engagement through a change in its recommendation algorithm are the central, and, at least within the movie's narrow frame, even sole cause of all that ails American democracy. Sorkin's story has no room for nuance or ambiguity, no interest in the larger political-social dynamics at work in the late 2010s and early 2020s, no time for disconfirming data that violates his narrative. He has found a pure villain in Facebook's founder, and that's the only story he wants to tell.
Like so many of Sorkin's films, The Social Reckoning is structured around what amounts to a trial, in this case a mock congressional hearing set up for Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, in advance of an appearance on Capitol Hill. The action inside that room is informed by a larger story that revolves around Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz's (played by Jeremy Allen White) quest to understand and uncover documentation that led to his award-winning investigative series, The Facebook Files. Horwitz works with Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook engineer who has concerns about the company's practices and begins leaking information in hopes of causing internal change. She's an anxious, socially awkward recluse; he's a tech-ignorant reporter who ended up on the Big Tech beat. The pairing allows Sorkin to build scene after scene of exposition and explanation, in which Haugen details various Facebook technical decisions believed to have dire social consequences.
Most notable among these is an algorithmic switch to something called "MSI," or "meaningful social interactions." Essentially, the network prioritized depth of engagement over simple likes, leading to a boost in usage, as well as an increase in exposure to radical groups and content. The movie poses as a sophisticated journalistic explainer, but its core argument is quite simple: Facebook changed its algorithm in a way that benefited the company but harmed society by pushing content from hate groups and other disreputable types. That, in turn, led to January 6. Case closed.
But what if the case isn't so simple? In these pages, Elizabeth Nolan Brown has outlined the many ways in which social media algorithms, especially on Facebook, have been unjustly maligned: Instead of causing polarization by locking people into narrow political bubbles, they can offer greater exposure to opposing views and even promote democratic virtues. The supposed negative effects of tech on children are, at minimum, disputed and in most cases probably overstated; some studies suggest that tech can enhance youth mental health. It's notable that Sorkin's story uses the violent calamity of January 6—a truly dark day for America—as his climactic argument. He can't use the election of 2020, because that election was won by Joe Biden. So he falls back to the ugliness of the riot, while ignoring Donald Trump.
The movie is framed in personal terms via the story of one woman's radicalization. The woman—rich, white, entitled, casually racist during a drunken encounter with cops that she films and posts on social media—turns out to be a friend of Haugen's, which is what drives her to go public about her employer. Sorkin uses the woman as a symbol of all that Facebook has done wrong; she's a consequence of Zuckerberg's disregard for democracy and truth.
But in real life, Haugen's never-named radicalized friend was a man, not a woman, who became obsessed with conspiratorial notions about politics, not a racist social-media troll. Sorkin's film is fiction, a dramatic retelling of events rather than a just-the-facts journalistic account, so it doesn't quite need to be held to the same standard. But it's notable that he has to massage the details in order to make his point. Perhaps he's doing so in service of a deeper truth. But that deeper truth isn't strictly true.
Humans are messy and complicated, and so is democracy. But Sorkin can't handle those complications. Instead, he delivers a smug, simplistic narrative that traffics in borderline misinformation while pretending to crusade for the truth. Maybe what we really need is a reckoning with Aaron Sorkin.
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