Although director David Fincher’s The Social Network was a blistering indictment of the greed and betrayal involved with Facebook’s founding and subsequent rise in popularity — fueled by scripter Aaron Sorkin’s marvelously barbed, Oscar-winning adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires — that film now seems quaint.
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| Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) watches, with mounting horror, while Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) reveals the many ways that her company sacrifices user safety while in pursuit of ever more "clicks." |
Today, Facebook has slightly more than three billion active users, and — as Sorkin’s new film tells us, via a depressing end title card — a shocking 43 percent of the world’s adults get their “news” from unvetted, unreliable and downright bogus social media posts.
Writer/director Sorkin’s sequel is divided into a prologue and three distinct chapters, the latter of which slide the film’s timeline back and forth from 2019 to 2021, with stops in between. The prologue, titled “White Girl Wasted,” initially is a puzzle. A drunk young woman (Portia Doubleday), standing by her overheated vehicle late one night, becomes irrationally angered by the two police officers who (initially) simply wish to help.
She erupts into furious, “full Karen” mode, begins live-streaming the encounter, and unleashes a profanity-laced tirade accusing them of harassment “because she’s white.”
Elsewhere, her viral video is seen by a horrified Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a skilled data scientist/product manager who recently has joined Facebook’s Civic Integrity team. Although Haugen genuinely loves her job, she has become increasingly worried by the way Zuckerberg and his lieutenants have aggressively prioritized engagement (“clicks”) and revenue, over even modest user safety.
(Haugen became famous as the Facebook whistleblower who testified before the U.S. Congress on October 5, 2021.)
During an apparently rare meeting with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), Haugen and her fellow team members silently watch as their leader attempts to stand up to him, by insisting that “downstream MSI” (meaningful social interactions) could be “dialed back” to reduce civic misinformation by 38 percent, at a “cost” of reducing engagement by only 1 percent.
“One percent at scale,” Zuckerberg snaps back, “is three million people who stop scrolling.”
At which point, the suggestion is dead in the water ... along with, quite likely, the Civic Integrity team leader’s employment.
It must be noted how Sorkin stages this scene. Zuckerberg’s office, all steel and glass — one of production designer Jon Hutman’s memorable tableaus — is sterile and harshly impersonal. Strong plays Zuckerberg as arrogant, emotionless and coldly condescending: a tyrant who refuses to hear the word “No.” He’d be right at home as a ruthless James Bond villain, except that we’ve had plenty of exposure to the actual Zuckerberg, who really is that contemptuous and oblivious to any notion of “the greater social good.”
What follows splits into two primary plotlines. The first, initially set in 2019, introduces investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), newly hired by Christina (Betty Gilpin), the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau chief, to investigate what is becoming an increasingly clear pattern of Facebook’s unethical behavior.
Although a tech neophyte — Horwitz is late to his first meeting, because he’s new to the area and can’t program his rental car’s sat-nav system — he’s a thorough investigator. He also knows it’ll be difficult to penetrate Facebook’s notoriously impervious media shield. But Horwitz is certain that at least one silently ethical company employee might respond to a carefully worded personal letter.
He therefore assigns interns Zach and Evelyn (Aidan Laprete and Kelley Pereira, both endearing) to assemble a list of all employees, so he can write that many individual letters (!).
He scores with Haugen.
Their subsequent clandestine meetings — she’s deservedly paranoid, and scrupulously careful — have the gently bantering charm of a classic Frank Capra film. White plays Horwitz as a genial, old-school romantic; he loves vintage movies and show tunes.
Early on, Haugen hits Horwitz with a ghastly statistic: “Sixty-four percent of the people who join extremist groups on Facebook are sent there by our algorithm.”
Madison, having carefully selected this role as the big-screen follow-up to her Oscar-winning performance in 2024’s Anora, makes Haugen touchingly vulnerable, in part due to the chronic autoimmune condition that forces her to wear gloves and leg warmers, while keeping her apartment at 82 degrees. She’s also a bundle of nervous anxiety and impatience: the latter frequently directed at Horwitz’s tech ignorance. This, too, makes for classic Sorkin-style banter.
At one point, when Horwitz asks her to explain something she has just said, she peevishly replies, “Which bit?”
“All of it.”
“Aren’t you a tech reporter?” she asks, incredulously.
“Ish,” he answers, defensively.
(Sorkin fabricated Horwitz’s obliviousness; the actual journalist was totally tech-savvy. But this fictitious characteristic forces Madison’s Haugen to explain things thoroughly, which thus allows us to understand them.)
White and Madison are a lot of fun together, even during the saga’s more serious moments, particularly as their mutual trust develops.
The second plotline, set in early January 2021, finds Zuckerberg being prepped for Senate testimony by crisp Facebook legal counsel and crisis management specialist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku, persuasively shrewd). Their dynamic is rat-a-tat ferocious; she’s probably the only person who can argue with Zuckerberg.
Co-counsel Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), once a staunch ally but now loathed by Zuckerberg due to past “betrayals,” serves as the impassioned voice of reason, doomed to be ignored. Garrigan’s speeches, and Burr’s performance, are pure Sorkin: Garrigan delivers all the arguments we’d love to hurl at Zuckerberg.
To a degree, then, Sorkin’s film is cathartic; it’s refreshing to know that some folks did — and continue to — fight the good fight. But it’s also impossible to ignore the deeply disturbing feeling that we’re witnessing a slow-motion train wreck, the effects of which continue to pollute our real world to this day.
Sorkin builds his film to a climax — blatantly, unapologetically manipulative — on January 6, when a certain petulant loser used social media to exhort and then gleefully watch, as his violent followers attacked the U.S. Capitol.
The Social Reckoning already is a box-office bomb, having grossed a meager $5 million during its opening weekend. It’ll clearly never come close to matching its predecessor’s worldwide $225 take ... which, sadly, means that the many people who should see this film, never will.
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