Early in The Social Reckoning, a douchey finance bro on a joyless date with the protagonist makes the preposterous claim that chlorophyll is “an internal deodorant,” stating this as fact because he read it on Facebook. “You drink it and your sweat smells like flowers!” he enthuses. While the scene is played for low-key cringe comedy, it nails two key issues at the heart of Aaron Sorkin’s engrossing whistleblower thriller — one is the irresponsible spread of misinformation on the supposedly smiley-happy social media service, while the other is the public’s willingness to buy whatever gets fed to them.

When Jeremy Strong’s cartoonishly affectless but mordantly funny Mark Zuckerberg — whose founding of Facebook was chronicled with needling perspicacity in David Fincher’s 2010 drama The Social Network — describes himself as “a free-speech absolutist,” what he means is that his opposition to fact checking is company policy. That applies whether we’re talking organized hate groups, politicians slamming their opponents in negative campaigning, or teenage mean girls bullying and body-shaming their peers.

The Social Reckoning

The Bottom Line

The algorithm is the enemy.

Release date: Friday, Oct. 9
Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, Anna Lambe, Gbenga Akinnagbe
Director-screenwriter: Aaron Sorkin
Rated R,
1 hour 52 minutes

Sorkin won an Oscar with his adapted screenplay for The Social Network, and if his follow-up, coming 16 years later and seeing him step up to writer-director responsibilities, doesn’t measure up to its critically lauded predecessor, well, that’s an awfully high bar to clear. But this nominal sequel makes for sharp entertainment, even if it sticks you with the depressing takeaway of a cautionary tale addressing a blight that’s too late to fix.

Along with his signature rapid-fire, garrulous dialogue, Sorkin’s tendency for self-righteous indignation is very much in evidence. But the material provides him with plenty of legitimate reasons to be pissed, and the movie is never at risk of becoming a pedantic lecture.

It’s also acted with galvanizing conviction. Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the introverted Facebook data engineer who believes in the company’s mission to give everyone a voice — until she sees the profit-driven ways in which that freedom of expression is giving a mouthpiece to extremists. And Jeremy Allen White is Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal tech reporter with whom Haugen collaborates on an explosive series of articles informally titled The Facebook Files, exposing the toxic culture behind the company’s stratospheric reach.

There’s a fascinating synchronicity between the current real-world anxiety and the film industry’s sudden interest in dense studies of the tech world’s dark underbelly. A week after Sony releases The Social Reckoning, Bleecker Street will open Musk, Alex Gibney’s head-spinning documentary, running close to four hours, about the rise and rise of Tesla titan Elon Musk. On Christmas Day, Neon will weigh in with the best of the three, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a humorous and ultimately horrifying account of 20 years of AI evolution and a scorching portrait of OpenAI founder Sam Altman. (There’s also Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything — a different beast entirely.)

What all three films have in common, aside from various intersections and overlaps in their stories, is their repositioning of tech billionaires as the new screen villains. Lawyers and finance traders must feel so relieved. Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman to some extent are all exceedingly skilled, ethically dubious con men, all of them able to sell their insatiable hunger for astronomical wealth as a service to humanity, while also selling themselves, not as technocrats so much as creative visionaries.

Sorkin opens with a tartly funny prologue whose title, “White Girl Wasted,” refers to a motorist (Portia Doubleday) who has pulled over to the side of the road, where she stands behind the vehicle scrolling through her phone. When two cops approach asking if she needs assistance, she is curtly dismissive but becomes hostile and racially abusive once they ask her — with good reason — to take a sobriety test.

A double-whammy monster of entitlement and victimhood, the drunk woman films the events leading to her arrest and later posts the video under the header “Voice of Reason,” including the screeching outburst: “This is what happens when you’re white in America, you get treated like a fucking immigrant!” It’s later revealed that Frances knew the woman in the viral video back when she was a mellow progressive, learning that she was radicalized by an alt-right group on Facebook.

Frances’ data research has already turned up a bunch of similar cases, including the alarming statistic that 64 percent of Facebook users who recently joined extremist groups were directed to those organizations’ sites by the algorithm.

Sorkin briskly paints a portrait of a company with an uncongenial working environment and little transparency. Frances’ attempt to raise her concerns at a team meeting where Zuckerberg addresses the assembled staff is cut off when there’s no time left for questions. And when she tries talking to colleagues, one smirks at her quaint use of index cards while another warns her against drawing negative attention.

At the same time, Jeff transfers from a political beat in Washington to become the new San Francisco tech reporter, getting a barbed reception from bureau chief Christina (Betty Gilpin) when he’s late for their first meeting because he couldn’t work the car’s GPS system. While brittle Christina rolls her eyes at being stuck with an analog guy to cover Big Tech, Jeff’s editor Andy (Gbenga Akinnagbe) is a far more chill ally. Jeff is assigned two social media-savvy interns and instructed to get up to speed on Facebook, where he has already noticed the improbably low number of negative comments about user satisfaction.

In another thread, Strong’s Zuckerberg twitches with irritation through mock congressional hearings, with a PR team headed by crisis management specialist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), whose task is to make the Facebook CEO likable. Given that he’s a warmth-free zone who can’t even settle on the right tie, that job is no walk in the park. Media relations exec Teddy Marks (Billy Magnussen) looks in from time to time, and Raya has also invited someone guaranteed to ruffle Mark’s feathers, his former colleague Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), who just published an unsparing op-ed piece in a major newspaper condemning Facebook’s lax safeguards.

Hoping to sniff out someone inside Facebook willing to talk, Jeff sends personal letters to almost every employee and given that Frances has hit a wall trying to bring what she believes are algorithmic glitches to anyone’s attention, she replies. When they meet in an isolated park location, she is nervous about breaking the terms of her contractual NDA. But she gives Jeff some basics about content violations on which to build a story.

As Jeff continues to dig, with further intel from the reluctant Frances, his findings gradually point to Zuckerberg and members of his executive team having full knowledge of the harmful side-effects of their business strategy — deprioritizing “likes” and instead pushing for reshares, with rage bait driving traffic in exponential numbers.

Important-sounding acronyms are batted about to suggest internal guardrails — like MSI (Meaningful Social Interactions), CIT (Civic Integrity Team) or SATF (Soft Action Task Force). But at the prospect of engagement dropping by even one percent, Zuckerberg rules out any serious measures against content violation, making Charlie furious by refusing to consider policing political ads for falsehoods. “We’re a corkboard,” says Zuckerberg with unwavering impassivity. “We don’t control what people pin on it.”

Without ever naming the sitting U.S. president, Sorkin hits hard by showing footage (which appears to be largely re-enacted) of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021. Staffers urge Zuckerberg to take down videos of the insurrection posted by POTUS, enduring an agonizing wait before he finally gives the order — deleting posts being the last-resort “hard action.”

There’s nothing terribly subtle about The Social Reckoning, though sometimes its blunt force can take your breath away, for instance when Teddy, with cold, smug efficiency, responds to the threat of congressional scrutiny by saying, “We’re not frightened by Congress. We are post-government around here.” With Facebook currently counting north of 3 billion monthly active users worldwide, and 43 percent of adults now getting their news from the platform, it’s grim knowing that even after the WSJ stories ran and Haugen testified before Congress nothing changed in terms of fact checking.

Sorkin gonna Sorkin, so the hectoring superiority creeps in at times, even if he keeps the speechifying to a minimum. But he presents a persuasive case for this monolithic “community forum” as a 21st-century plague that stokes division, harms children and weakens democracies.

The movie looks terrific, with DP Jeff Cronenweth returning to provide visual consistency with The Social Network and Alexandre Desplat’s elegant score feeding the tension without working too hard at it.

Strong’s decidedly peculiar performance is likely to be divisive, maybe leaving some to wonder whether he’s intentionally trying to be funny at times. But he gets the emotionless reptilian aspect of a man who can look the other way while his money-making machine is being instrumentalized by drug cartels and human traffickers or used as a tool to influence elections or causing a significant spike in teen mental health issues.

Others in the cast doing incisive work include Mosaku, Burr, Magnussen and Gilpin, though the heart of the movie is White and especially Madison. White’s everyman quality sits well with a character for whom journalistic integrity is non-negotiable. “My bias is not because tech is taking journalists’ jobs,” he tells Frances early in their association. “It’s because you’re doing them so badly.” Madison has made a smart choice for her biggest role since bagging an Oscar for Anora; her character’s trajectory from Facebook believer through disillusioned outlier to courageous whistleblower is stirringly rendered.