Where the 2010 film about the founding of Facebook was almost unnervingly timely, this procedural drama about the 2021 'Facebook Files' leak already feels behind the curve. Prior to its 2010 release, a much-held suspicion about “The Social Network” was that it was too soon for a film about Facebook. At a time when most of us were still avidly adding friends on the platform, it felt like the story wasn’t yet complete.
But that’s what made David Fincher’s pristinely crafted, coolly perceptive film so riveting, and so urgent: A compelling origin story, it also sounded a clear warning that Facebook, as benignly as we may have used it, wasn’t itself benign, and the man behind it, even less so. 16 years later, with “The Social Reckoning,” the previous film’s screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is out to tell us that he was right all along. The difference, this time, is we already know that. Where “The Social Network” came to feel, if anything, even more exhilaratingly prescient with the passage of time, a certain air of “too little too late” hangs over “The Social Reckoning.” A diverting-enough, clever-enough, true-enough examination of how Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, well, lost face, it covers events between the years 2019 and 2021 — and winds up playing as a veritable period piece, so drastically have the tech-wars stakes shifted and expanded in the half-decade since then.
Sorkin’s film covers, in measured procedural detail, the story of how Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), with the aid of whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), uncovered awful truths behind the platform’s algorithmic support of extremist political groups and its complicity in Instagram’s detrimental effects on young users — as methodically detailed, among other horrors, in Horwitz’s series of exposés titled “The Facebook Files.” It extends to Haugen’s powerful testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, and ties things off there, on a rare, rousing instance of truth being spoken to power. (With a side cheer for the value of old-school shoe-leather journalism.) But if many viewers will be largely caught up on what happens in “The Social Reckoning,” they’ll also be au fait with what has happened since — and in the year 2026, with Facebook still an unregulated hive of toxic misinformation, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence changing the game on all fronts, the film’s note of stopgap triumph is quaint at best, and hardly satisfying. It’s a reminder that “The Social Network” was both Sorkin’s best writing achievement and, with its dominant note of queasy, unresolved anxiety, his least characteristic; a fine fit for Fincher’s particular brand of sharp, shadowy mood-mongering, here conspicuous by its absence.
The new film sporadically nods to its predecessor’s dark, charged quiet, but with Sorkin in the director’s chair this time, the speechifying idealist of “The West Wing” and “The Triumph of the Chicago 7” prevails. It begins with an isolated, fictional prologue that, give or take some updated technology, recalls Paul Haggis’ “Crash” in its button-pushing. A young white woman, Kayleigh (Portia Doubleday), is approached by Black and Asian police officers on the side of a busy road, as she waits for the AAA to attend to her broken-down vehicle; she reacts hostilely to their initial offer of assistance, and the encounter rapidly escalates into a racialized confrontation, as she hurls racist hate speech at the cops, filming them on her phone all the while.
Shortly afterwards, she uploads the footage to Voice of Reason, a white-supremacist Facebook group, where it’s spotted by Haugen, a junior product manager on Facebook’s short-lived civic integrity team. Kayleigh is a former friend of hers, and a former liberal to boot. Clearly calculated to sidestep any latter-day discourse about police corruption, it’s a punchy but schematic opening salvo, boldfacing the issue of how social media has the power to radicalize moderate minds.
The year is 2019, more than halfway into Trump’s first term; Haugen, charismatically drawn by Madison as a GenZ scrapper who still believes in changing the world, perhaps shouldn’t be as shocked as she is by the video. Or by the indifference of her superiors to her meticulously gathered data on how 64% of extremist group joiners on Facebook were driven there by the platform’s recommendation tool, among other grim stats. Facebook’s professed commitment to “civic integrity,” she learns, is mere public-relations window-dressing: When, in a meeting with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), her team proposes simple safeguarding measures that may cause a 1% drop in engagement, you can guess his answer.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
