4 min read
In the five years since Frances Haugen peeled back the curtain on Facebook and the social media platform’s intentional spread of misinformation to its users, she’s become the subject of The Social Reckoning, a sequel to The Social Network (2010). The film aims to spotlight the company’s unraveling following the publication of a 2021 Wall Street Journal exposé about the website’s harmful algorithmic changes, and the case that would later unfold in front of Congress.
Haugen is played by Mikey Madison in the film. In the time between her casting and the film’s premiere, Madison revealed in an interview with Vogue that she and Haugen have communicated “a little bit over email.” She realized that despite their visual differences, Haugen “really just wants the story to be told.”
With The Social Reckoning, Haugen hopes that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is able to reflect on his actions and possibly choose a better future. “It’s very possible that Mark has learned to not see how distorted his world has become,” Haugen told The Verge. “My hope is that holding that mirror up, if he does ever watch the movie, that it gives him the gift of perspective, so he at least has a chance to choose.”
In 2021, The Wall Street Journal published The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation, which revealed the contents of thousands of confidential documents that examined the social media platform’s algorithmic changes designed to weaken responses to human...
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