‘The Social Reckoning’ Is an Even Bigger Burn on Mark Zuckerberg Than You Think

Last week, before I saw Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning, I was going to write an item on a sly eye-popper of an ad that gives Mark Zuckerberg a taste of his own medicine.

The Sony Pictures-produced spot, which you can view here, is the most direct roast of a tech exec — really any exec — that I can remember seeing in a piece of Hollywood marketing in a long time. As it teases the Oct. 9 release about Frances Haugen and The Facebook Files from some half-dozen years ago, it drops the line “Mark Zuckerberg Will Love The Social Reckoning.”

And just as you’re clocking that and wondering, “Is that really true?” the ad snaps back with “Instagram doesn’t fact-check most ads. Why should we?” This is not an idle burn, as the movie itself deals with Zuckerberg’s longstanding reluctance to fact-check political ads on Meta‘s platforms. Oh, and the ad? It’s running on… Instagram. (There’s also a Facebook version running on Facebook.)

But as I was preparing an item on the topic, I saw the movie, attending the world premiere in New York on Sunday night. And as direct as the ad is (more on it in a moment), the film goes even harder.

Sorkin’s script has Mikey Madison’s Haugen delivering lines from Haugen’s own Senate committee testimony that the company is “buying its profits with our safety” (actually the film has it as “health and safety”) and, in a highly cinematic scene, shows Facebook executives watching what can only be described as disturbing and ire-provoking footage of January 6.

It also has a legal advisor ripping into Zuckerberg for “commoditizing gullibility” and has the Facebook founder offering up one we’re-just-a-bulletin-board rationalization after another in a manner designed to have filmgoers throwing unopened soft-drink bottles at the screen. The company tweaks algorithms to prioritize reshares over likes — knowing full well that ragebait is the lion’s share of what gets reshared. The reporting on such matters is well-established, in the stories of Wall Street Journal journalist Jeff Horwitz (played here by Jeremy Allen White) and many others. But seeing the process consciously and callously attempted from the inside will give new fuel to those skeptical of social-media platforms and may even sway a few of the last undecideds to boot.

But the film most shoots the moon on the performance of Jeremy Strong, whose Zuckerberg is what would happen if The Truman Show’s Christof fell in a vat of acid and emerged as a cross between The Joker and Sheldon Cooper. Straying very far from the arrogant but still boyishly forgivable character Jesse Eisenberg played, Strong goes full-on villain, stoically arguing that even the slightest gesture of responsibility is anathema where money is concerned and shutting down anyone who might say otherwise.

Not only does he not smile or show any human emotion, Strong’s Zuckerberg seems to treat any gentle notation that his site is causing damage as a criminal interruption of the engagement work at hand. (At one point, he gets advice on a hearing not to say the words “users” or “humans,” as it makes him sound like he’s running an experiment on its customers. Facebook, of course, did just that.) I never knew it was possible to engage in character assassination by Method Acting, but Strong has proved me wrong.

What’s perhaps most striking is that Sony Pictures, of course itself part of a tech giant, is not batting an eye here, not only releasing the movie but getting enthusiastic about the ad, which I heard it batted around internally before deciding that cheekily poking at the truth was hardly inappropriate for a company that abdicated an obligation to it. To double down further, Sony dropped the teaser — intentionally — on the same day Meta settled its child-harm case filed by numerous attorneys general. Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki has apparently even seen the ad and liked it. The company, of course, does not play in the same sandbox as Meta, but any large corporation willing to take on a Silicon Valley giant these days counts as a major anomaly in this oligarchical era of outsized market caps and cozy White House meetings.

We occupy a strange cultural moment, when Hollywood studios and giant tech companies pass judgment on each other, each seeking to use its power to shape how the other is perceived. Meta, a week ago, rejected, then reversed course on an ad for Alex Gibney’s doc takedown Musk, and now a studio is about to weigh in on Meta.

This is, of course, not a fair fight, since even at its most successful Hollywood products are viewed in the millions while social-media giants measure results in the billions. (In case this power imbalance was not clear, Meta recently marshaled some resources to send a threatening legal letter to Sony, “just making the studio aware that Meta has lawyers,” as Sorkin put it to my colleague Caitlin Huston.)

Perhaps that is why it feels refreshing that HBO, Bleecker Street and, it now appears, Universal are sticking with commitments to release Musk, while Neon has stepped in to release the OpenAI vivisection Artificial when Amazon suddenly and not-so-mysteriously lost its appetite to do so.

Haugen gave her Senate testimony exactly five years ago today. It would be nice to believe that change has come and Zuckerberg has atoned for past sins. But yes, while Facebook’s political dial was turned down and while the famous New Mexico damages ruling on alleged child exploitation gave heart to dozens of other alleged victims, none of us are naive to think social media is back to a role of connecting people or mitigating harms. Nor have its platforms seen a loss of the kind you might expect from a Haugen-level whistleblower: Instagram’s user base has actually grown 25% since Haugen gave her testimony. Haugen herself says social media itself “may be worse off today than when I leaked the documents.”

Even Meta’s settlement with the attorneys general, which requires changes to features aimed at teens, contains plenty of unknowns and ties some of its actionability to competitors doing the same. Oh, and the advent of Meta’s Muse AI agent will give the company both another engagement tool to wield and an added layer of deniability.

Still, the fact that a movie is coming out that will get people talking about our relationship to Facebook and Instagram feels significant in its own right. As Toby Ziegler and Josiah Bartlett could tell you, the only way to change is the world is with a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens.