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.”
