Social media companies are like tobacco companies. They sold us a product we liked but lied about its true health risks. They profited while making us sicker.
So says Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” which is the “All the President’s Men” of our time in that it is a stirring journalistic thriller that shows how shoe-leather investigative reporting can still hold the powerful accountable — or at least muck up their operations.
The film follows socially shy young employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison of “Anora”), who discovers internal company documents showing the social media platform Facebook and its sister app Instagram knowingly engineered algorithms that exposed teenage girls to online bullying and stoked violent political discourse. She believes it’s wrong and decides to do something about it.
Frances leaks the documents to tech-averse Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White of “The Bear”), whose reporting results in a series of published articles in 2021 known as “The Facebook Files.” The investigation led to Congressional hearings and years of lawsuits that have cost the company, now called Meta, billions of dollars.
But Sorkin does more than craft a journalistic detective story. While “All the President’s Men” (1976) never showed President Richard M. Nixon, who had ordered the Watergate break-ins that led to his resignation, “The Social Reckoning” is downright fascinated with the orchestrator of all this mayhem, Facebook co-founder and...
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