• Director: Aaron Sorkin
• Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin
• Producer: Todd Black, Peter Rice, Aaron Sorkin, Tony A. Grier, Stuart M. Besser
• Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong
• Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth
• Editing: Alan Baumgarten
• Score: Alexandre Desplat
• Genre: Biographical legal thriller
• Runtime: 112 minutes

After winning the Best Actress Oscar for ‘Anora‘, Mikey Madison had studios banging at her door. She was a newly minted star and could opt for whatever role she desired. Instead of tanking her career with a superhero flick destined to fail and passing on an offer to appear in the next ‘Star Wars‘ movie, she’s selected the pick of the crop: a quietly engrossing whistleblower drama. Madison plays Frances Haugen, a mousy Facebook data engineer who, with the help of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White), leaked tens of thousands of internal documents detailing the abandonment of a duty of care by her employers.

Frances truly believes in Facebook’s founding ethos – to connect people on a global scale. She’s an introvert and social media gives users a chance to be confident from behind a screen. The way the public use the site has shifted since its creation in 2004. I have an account (I use it as little as I can) but all I see when I catch myself using it is AI slop and right-wing rage bait. It’s a cesspool. It’s a domain of doomscrolling boomers. Facebook now owns Instagram, as if they’re cornering the market over there, brainwashing younger users with algorithms designed to keep them hooked for as long as possible. The content amplified to teenage girls has a detrimental effect on their body image while the platform itself is a battleground on which cyberbullies reign supreme.

Then we move on to misinformation. So much false information. Facebook is the chief suspect in the instigation of the January 6th Capitol Riots, depicted in brief yet powerful scenes. A whopping 64% of individuals who joined extremist groups on the site were directed there by Facebook’s own recommendation system. The algorithm continues to promote right-wing propaganda if you’ve liked or shared such material. All the worst, ire-inducing content served up on a plate. A stew of hatefulness.

These leaks demonstrate company executives are aware of how harmful the site is. Mark Zuckerberg is the architect of manipulation. A man who can’t bear to lose even 1% of engagement if it means the level of misinformation decreases signficantly. Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg brilliantly, capturing the total lack of compassion, giving anyone who disagrees with him short shrift. He’s a cold, almost robotic figure.

Whereas ‘The Social Network‘ charted the rise of Facebook out of a university dorm room, ‘The Social Reckoning‘ destroys any credibility the company has. It’s not balanced but when there’s irrefutable proof that the platform is doing more harm than good, it becomes a matter of holding those responsible to account. Frances doesn’t set out to dismantle Facebook, she wants to remedy it. It’s a company who clearly don’t take well to being told how to operate so her mission transforms into something on the scale of David vs. Goliath. A fictional media relations executive tells Jeff: “We’re twice as big as the biggest country on Earth. We’re post-government around here.”. Chilling.

Did it need to be made? Yes. We spend so much time on our phones, scrolling incessantly, more so now than we did a decade earlier. This is a sobering watch. It shows us how complicit big tech are in manipulating what we see on small screens and the destructive force it has on our society.

The film concludes with a victory of sorts – Frances attains protected whistleblower status, avoids being sued into a million tiny pieces, and testifies before the United States Senate. Though risking her career wasn’t enough to improve Facebook’s protocol going forward. The company no longer fact-checks any of their content and it’s where 43% of Americans get their daily news from. You can’t fix what’s already broken. Not even by changing their name to ‘Meta’.

My rating: 8 / 10