What The Social Reckoning gets right — and wrong

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning has its fair share of cinematic flair, but many details in the story hew closely to real life. The movie tells the story of how Frances Haugen, a Facebook civic integrity product manager, came to leak a large trove of internal documents to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, in what would later become a 2021 series called The Facebook Files. In both real life and in the film, Haugen’s leaks lead her to testify as a congressional whistleblower. The final frames of the movie describe the impact she had even after that closing scene, speaking before governments around the world and bolstering lawsuits against Meta nationwide with the internal communications she disclosed. The film’s Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, says that she really believes in Facebook, echoing a message the real Haugen left for her colleagues just before she signed off for her last day in May 2021. I don’t hate Facebook, she wrote on the company’s internal message board, according to The Journal. I love Facebook. I want to save it. Sorkin, both directing and screenwriting the semi-follow up to 2010’s The Social Network, which he only wrote, took some liberties with the dialogue and the chronology of the movie. The most obvious is that he condensed the timeline and shifted major events forward by several months. Some key moments in the film — Zuckerberg preparing for a congressional hearing about misinformation and extremism and Horwitz getting ready to publish the first Facebook Files report — occur on the same day, which happens to be January 6th, 2021, amid the insurrection at the US Capitol. In reality, Zuckerberg testified in the House alongside other tech CEOs in March 2021, and the first installment of the Facebook Files wasn’t published until that September. But the movie pulls directly from Horwitz’ investigation and the documents that Haugen collected, which showed how the company applied its content moderation policies in inconsistent ways, drove users toward hate groups, and had meager responses to apparent human trafficking on the platform. Meta declined to provide a comment on the movie, but in past statements, the company has referred to the documents collected by Haugen and their recounting in the Facebook Files as cherry-picked to serve a specific narrative. Zuckerberg called the reporting Facebook Files a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company during a 2021 earnings call after the initial reports were released, and said that when faced with impossible tradeoffs, these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing different difficult social values. The film serves as a dramatized reflection of a pivotal moment in tech history, forcing audiences to confront the tension between corporate growth and social responsibility. While Sorkin’s narrative choices prioritize dramatic tension, the underlying facts regarding the internal struggles at Meta remain a subject of intense public interest and ongoing regulatory scrutiny.