The Social Reckoning

 

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin still delivers! In spades!

Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to 2010's The Social Network directed by David Fincher, is a recreation of the work that went into a blistering series of Wall Street Journal articles about Facebook's use of manipulative algorithms to retain and drive traffic on its sites.

The stories were broken by conscientious Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen (another awards-caliber performance by Anora's Mikey Madison), who uncovers troubling correlations between extremist group membership growth and the platform's recommendations.

The isolated but warmhearted, social-media-true-believer can't interest her harried co-workers in what she has found. This is understandable, considering the culture of dismissive intimidation founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong of Succession and The Apprentice) has created. Keep rowing; don't disrupt.

Coincidentally, downsized investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White of The Bear and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere) joins the thinning ranks of the WSJ's San Francisco bureau to cover tech, exploring the highly secretive social media giant's unprecedented growth and dominance of the industry.

Horwitz, notably NOT tech savvy, floats online invitations in hopes of finding someone willing to talk about the company. He and a highly anxious Haugen eventually team up to unravel Facebook's Byzantine data trail of audience manipulation and negative impacts, including increases in hate speech and bullying.

Strong's Zuckerberg, as written by Sorkin, is a market-driven automaton, pushing staff members who sweat the details to cut to the chase during department presentations, bottomlining costs and benefits, free of ethical and moral concerns, at least those that don't impact earnings.

The film's narrative timeline moves back and forth to show the reporting coming to gather and Zuckerberg's being prepped by crisis consultant (Wunmi Mosaku of Sinners) for a congressional hearing about the company. The story is capped with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Zuckerberg's response to the postings from the scene and those from the White House.

True to form, Sorkin's Social Reckoning is intricate and verbose, his characters talk a lot and rapidly, and the film bears Sorkin's brand of liberalism, which seems to be a version of the old newsperson's saw -- "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." This picture is an example of how this was done.