The Social Reckoning, director Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to 2010’s The Social Network, tracks the efforts of whistleblower Frances Haugen and investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz as they uncover the “Facebook Files.” This engaging film talks about the harms that Facebook and Instagram have caused, but the foul language takes it out of reach for families that might benefit from seeing it.
If you knew that a product was going to harm people, specifically vulnerable teenage girls, what percentage of those girls would you consider acceptable to hurt before removing the product?
What if that same product would also directly expose its users to extremist content that incites violence, enable drug and human traffickers, was rarely (if ever) fact-checked and promoted “ragebait” for the sake of increased user engagement?
If someone told you that the answer to the first question was 32%—that more than 3 in 10 teenage girls would undergo serious emotional duress as a result of this product—would you still use it yourself? Would you risk letting your daughter or niece or little sister use it?
It’s 2019, and data scientist Frances Haugen works for Facebook’s “Civic Integrity” team. She loves her job. She believes in the mission of Facebook. In fact, she considers the mission to be a “virtuous” one: Facebook connects people—people who might be awkward or self-conscious like herself—with other people in a way that makes them feel safe and comfortable, in a way that allows them to be their “best selves.”
Unfortunately, as much as Frances believes in Facebook’s mission, as much as she wants the social network to fulfill its potential of bringing out “the best in us,” that isn’t what she’s seeing in the data.
Frances sees the harm being caused—not just to teen girls, but to everyone who uses the social media platform—but when she tries to inform her supervisors, they tell her not to cause trouble. Her team is beholden to the will of Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. They can make recommendations, but ultimately, it’s his decision whether to implement them.
Frances is powerless.
That is, until investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz reaches out.
Jeff isn’t a tech guy; he’s a politics guy. His usual beat covers stuff happening in and around the Capitol. He doesn’t like social media. He doesn’t even have a Facebook account. But lately, he’s seen a connection between what’s been happening in San Francisco and what’s been happening in Washington. He has a sense that Facebook may be impacting politics in a meaningful, even dangerous, way.
Jeff doesn’t know how to connect the dots, though. He doesn’t even know how to use a GPS. But Frances does. She knows exactly how to navigate her way through Facebook’s files to find the data that could prove Jeff’s theory.
Frances insists she doesn’t want to hurt Facebook: She wants to help it.
But maybe helping Facebook means helping the people who want to highlight its internal problems rather than continue hiding them.
Jeff and Frances are not instant friends. In fact, it takes nearly two years of working together for Frances to truly trust Jeff. During that time, Jeff doesn’t pressure Frances or try to bully her into going on record. He’s patient and kind. And when Frances is mean to him—she’s astonished by his sheer lack of technological know-how—he takes it with aplomb.
But that’s why Frances knows she can trust Jeff with the information she’s providing. She knows he isn’t trying to hurt anyone. Quite the opposite. Jeff, like Frances, wants to fix what’s happening at Facebook.
Of course, trust isn’t the only thing holding Frances back. She is plagued with self-doubt. She doesn’t understand why she’s the only person at Facebook, out of hundreds, who agreed to work with Jeff. She wonders why she’s the only person risking her career to address Facebook’s problems.
It isn’t until another employee lends support, giving Frances the study about the harms Instagram (a Facebook property) has caused teen girls, that Frances finally makes her decision. She gives Jeff full access to documents that will later be dubbed the “Facebook Files.” She bravely agrees to go on record, using her real name.
Jeff warns Frances that becoming a whistleblower will blacklist her from future tech jobs, that nobody will want to hire her, and he even tries to protect her from some of that backlash. But Frances has already accepted the consequences. She believes in the potential for social media to do good, and she would rather risk her promising tech career than allow social media to be turned into something that promotes hatred. In so doing, it seems that Frances finds purpose and meaning.
Jeff’s boss at the Wall Street Journal has a harsh and often angry demeanor. However, Jeff understands that she’s on his side. So when she struggles to deliver a compliment after a job well done, he lets her off the hook: He knows she appreciates his hard work.
Similarly, Jeff demands a lot of the interns who work at the Wall Street Journal. One intern repeatedly calls him out for this, particularly when he calls her in the middle of the night for a work inquiry. But she dutifully completes the work anyways, indicating that while the work is, in fact, quite difficult, she also considers it a worthwhile cause.
Someone recounts the tale of Cassandra from Greek mythology. In the myth, they say, the god Apollo gives the mortal Cassandra the ability to see the future. However, he also curses her by making it so that nobody will ever believe her predictions.
Someone insinuates that Baptist schools treat math like witchcraft.
We see a young woman in her underwear making out with a shirtless guy on her bed. They stop when the woman receives a phone call.
Because Facebook is aware that Jeff is investigating the company, Frances has to meet with him in secret at his hotel room. Frances disguises herself by wearing form-fitting, cleavage-baring dresses, reasoning that if one of her colleagues spots her, they’ll think she’s on a date. (Some awkward dialogue confirms that she would rather her coworkers think she was hooking up with some stranger than betraying the company.) However, nothing even remotely romantic ever occurs between Frances and Jeff.
We hear that some journalists have tried to trick Facebook employees into giving them information by reaching out through dating apps like Tinder. Frances’ boss encourages her to join a dating site, stating that she could “benefit from loosening up.”
We see some people in swimsuits and a waitress wearing a top that reveals most of her back. A drunk woman crudely suggests that a male police officer must be sleeping with his female supervisor.
The film depicts the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. A mob pushes through several barriers, trampling police officers under foot. A few security personnel are knocked to the ground. Someone stomps on an officer’s head. One security woman is flattened on some stairs, and we don’t see her get up from that encounter. People break windows and force their way inside the building. We see shots of a triage room with dozens of officers bleeding from head wounds and other serious injuries. And we’re told that the carpet of that room had to be replaced because custodians couldn’t shampoo out the blood.
Frances overhears a family discussing how to handle a bullying situation on Instagram. She encourages the parents to report the abuse, but they explain they already tried. It didn’t do any good because the bullies were using multiple accounts to create “hate” pages—11, to be exact. It’s derailing their daughter’s social structure, they say. And they only found out about the bullying because their daughter’s teacher called them after seeing self-harm cuts on the daughter’s arms during gym.
We hear that human trafficking has gained momentum through Facebook.
At one point, Frances smacks Jeff on the back of the head in a somewhat playful way.
There are about 30 uses of the f-word and 10 uses of the s-word. We also hear frequent uses of “b–ch” and more than a few of “a–hole,” “d–n” and “h—.” Someone uses the British expletive “bloody.”
God’s name is misused at least a dozen times, five times paired with either “d–n” or “d–mit.” Jesus’ name is also abused a handful of times.
People drink at bars and restaurants. Students in a college dorm drink and vape late into the night.
We hear that cartels are using Facebook in their drug trafficking efforts.
Police pull over to assist a woman experiencing car trouble on the side of the road. They quickly realize that she’s intoxicated, but since she isn’t driving the vehicle and they can’t prove she previously drove it or was intending to drive it again, they let her “slide.” However, when they tell the woman she’s getting off easy, she’s outraged, and she goes on a drunken rampage. …
… During that rampage, she begins to film the exchange (never mind that the officers have had their chest-cams recording the whole time), claiming the cops pulled her over (they didn’t), were getting in her face (they weren’t) and were only treating her this way because she is white (the officers are not white, but they never mentioned race). She makes several more racist and otherwise offensive comments, including an embarrassment of swear words. When she threatens to slap one officer, they issue her a verbal warning. Instead of listening, she then says she’s going to “kill” one of them. They arrest her at that point (it’s against the law to threaten a police officer), but the woman never seems to understand that she was in the wrong. (It should be noted that even before the woman’s rampage, she was incredibly rude to the officers, who are just trying to do their jobs.)
Later in the film, Frances says she used to know the woman who was arrested. She claims the woman was “radicalized” by Facebook. The film indicates that the woman was not an anomaly, juxtaposing (reenacted) footage of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with shots of Facebook employees (including Mark Zuckerberg) attempting to contain the flood of posts from that day. Mark at first hesitates to remove anything posted by a “sitting president,” but as the violence escalates, he eventually decides to remove the inciting posts.
Before seeking Jeff’s help, Frances tries to inform her supervisors that Facebook’s algorithm is promoting dangerous content at an alarming rate. However, she’s never allowed to share the data she’s collected. Instead, she’s essentially told to keep her head down and not to create “friction.”
Throughout the film, Facebook executives, namely Mark Zuckerberg, repeatedly make decisions that prioritize profits and engagement over user well-being, even when they are warned against such measures. For instance, when someone tells Mark that the “Meaningful Social Interactions” system—a new way to recommend content to users that will supposedly promote “genuine interactions”—is going to exponentially promote ragebait and other harmful content, he throws caution to the wind. The result is exactly as the naysayers predicted: Data eventually proves that the MSI system incited hatred and caused way more harm than good.
When told that Facebook should be fact-checking political ads, Mark claims that it’s not Facebook’s job to fact-check since most people know when they’re being lied to. He repeatedly says he respects users too much to censor content, but his actions demonstrate that he doesn’t respect them at all; he just doesn’t want to lose engagement. (He calls users “stupid” and “perverse.”) It also becomes clear that he’s afraid of losing support from politicians who have made laws that protect Facebook from litigation.
We hear that Facebook used bots to filter out negative feedback on a post about free speech.
Frances steals many documents from Facebook, violating her non-disclosure agreement. However, her motives are altruistic (and she eventually seeks protective, legal whistleblower status). Through her actions, we learn about many of Facebook’s misdeeds, such as the fact that it knew Instagram was detrimentally affecting the self-esteem of teenage girls.
A woman apparently lies to the police. We hear that reporters have tried to infiltrate Facebook by pretending to be employees of the company and lying to actual employees. Someone says, “Facts are subjective.”
After learning that Frances plans to go on record, a Facebook executive attempts to guilt-trip Jeff into not using her testimony, telling Jeff that doing so would ruin Frances’ life. When that fails, he then changes tactics, attempting to discredit Frances.
When a woman accuses someone of “mansplaining” something to her, he retorts that she’s only saying that because she is losing the argument.
Mark hires an entire crisis management team to help him prepare for a Senate hearing. They practice everything down to the last detail, from how deeply he should nod his head to what tie he should wear, and it makes Mark appear deeply manipulative.
Frances Haugen’s testimony and the information revealed in the Wall Street Journal’s “The Facebook Files” caused a monumental shift in social media when they were released in 2021. Attorneys general from 47 states united to sue the social media conglomerate Meta (as Facebook became known just three weeks after Jeff Horwitz’s articles were printed). Civil lawsuits have held the company responsible for the mental harms caused to teenagers.
And yet, Meta still exists. Facebook still exists. Instagram still exists. Worse still, the hatred bred on those platforms still exists.
Nobody is immune from online vitriol. Not even Mark Zuckerberg himself: “I know what strangers think about me. I read about it every day online. So does my wife. And so do my kids,” he says in this film.
Facebook, as Frances puts it, plays with “kerosene and matches.” Although the company and its founder claim its mission is to foster community, it does so through polarizing methods that often incite more anger than goodwill. It tries to keep users engaged for as long as possible. And its lack of meaningful action to protect users from potential harm seems to indicate that it doesn’t truly care about what happens to those users when they scroll for too long.
In 2010, Aaron Sorkin cowrote The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the famous Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The film presented Zuckerberg as a vulnerable figure who perhaps regretted some of his decisions but wasn’t going to apologize for his success. As writer and director of The Social Reckoning, Sorkin once again shows us that vulnerability—that human element—through Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Meta’s chief executive officer.
However, The Social Reckoning isn’t here to make us feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg. Just like Facebook’s algorithm, the film is designed to make us angry—albeit a more righteous anger than the algorithm might promote. Watching this film should inspire you to reconsider your social media habits—what you use it for, how often and how long you use it, who you follow and perhaps even how you vote regarding social media legislation.
There are some good messages to be gleaned here. Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White are quite the dynamic duo in their portrayals of Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz.
Unfortunately (and this truly is a bummer), the amount of foul language contained in The Social Reckoning is going to keep it out of reach from the very people who might benefit most from seeing it—tweens and teens whose entire social structure is built around social media.
For that reason, I can’t recommend The Social Reckoning for families. However, if you want to learn more about the harms of social media without the high f-bomb count, consider reading Plugged In’s Tech Guide, a completely free downloadable resource. You can also take a break from social media with help from our Screen Fast.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
