Directed by Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr

I’m a self-kidder. I told myself multiple times over the years that social media would not control my life, that I don’t have an addiction, that I’m not a doom-scroller, and that I don’t spend hours staring at feeds on any given day. Long in denial, I’d make up excuse after excuse: I never post. I need to be reachable. I need something from marketplace. If it’s not Facebook, it’s Instagram. It’s all Meta.

But what about those violent posts that randomly show up on my feed? News of lives being destroyed by incessant cyberbullying and trolling? Not to mention the armies of posts designed to radicalize or to just simply keep you engaged—mental health be damned? A lot of them aren’t even from real people or accounts. All this while Facebook, err, Meta, turns a blind eye.

David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) stylishly chronicled the goofy and compelling origins of Zuckerberg and Facebook. Now with The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s sequel dives headfirst into what Facebook has ultimately become. Darker, yes. Compelling? Even more so.

The film portrays the 2021 Facebook leak, where internal studies within the company suggested negative and very harmful effects of the platform on its users and that the company knew about it. Things reach a crescendo on January 6, when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, radicalized and fed misinformation through Facebook. Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, Facebook’s data scientist turned whistleblower who reaches out to WSJ journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg, with Bill Burr rounding out the cast.

Madison and White are solid, and their star power makes them an entertaining watch. Jeremy Strong’s casting is weirdly appropriate even though there’s barely a resemblance. Sorkin’s choice of Strong as Zuckerberg, while weird at first, becomes strangely appropriate the longer we watch the film. Bill Burr’s Charlie Garrigan is an interesting take on businessman/investor Roger McNamee as Zuckerberg’s vocal moral conscience but comes off mildly cartoonish, perhaps because it’s the most human interaction in the film, and pretty much all within Facebook’s walls seem inhuman by comparison. 

Sorkin portrays Facebook’s corporate culture and Zuckerberg as objectivist characters, all self-interest and intellectuality in the guise of free speech. What at first seems like a modulated caricature of Facebook’s founder becomes vivid and recognizable once you take stock of what’s out there in public view. Sorkin may be accenting a few things to make a point, but given the tech oligarchy’s questionable behavior in general, that’s not a stretch.

Before screening, I was ignorant of the Facebook leak while aware of the public outcry in the aftermath. Some of the revelations on Facebook’s algorithms, though obvious, are still shocking in 2026. The Social Reckoning at least puts faces on the players that tried to level the playing field for all of us. 

While not a perfect film, Sorkin’s simple direction and dialogue emphasize the story’s endurance over flashiness and style. It feels fittingly like a TV miniseries. But The Social Reckoning keeps its subject matter front and center and refuses to deviate from it. What came out of all this in 2021 is still shocking today. It’s still relevant. It still matters. But it still feels the full reckoning is yet to come—and that is the sad part.

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