Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison on the Perils of Social Media

The Social Reckoning co-stars stop by the Rolling Stone Studio to discuss their new movie, playing real people, and their own ups and downs with life online

Yes, Jeremy Allen White has a social media presence. No, he’s not 100 percent psyched about it.

The former star of The Bear and Oscar winner Mikey Madison stopped by the Rolling Stone Studio to talk about The Social Reckoning, their new movie about how investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz and Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed the company’s blasé attitude towards public safety, misinformation, and hate speech. In fact, the powers that be at Facebook (including Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jeremy Strong) may have been goosing the algorithms to make “outrage-bait” posts even more prevalent — a revelation that will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been on any social media site in the past decade.

Madison was an early adopter, noting that “I had an Instagram and a Facebook [account] when I was 13 — but that was the beginning of what it was in its original form, which was about connection.”

“What did it for you when you got rid of it so soon after you’d gotten it?” White asks her.

“I don’t even remember there being some moment where I was like, ‘I’m done with this,'” she replies. “I think it just never stuck.”

White admits he eventually felt a little “work pressure” to get an Instagram account, which he uses for professional purposes only. He also says he’s more than a little uneasy about what the companies behind social media platforms are doing with all of the information they’ve gathered on their users, and how any good intentions they started with may now have curdled.

“I have a relationship [with social media], but it’s a distanced one,” White says. “I think I always had doubts about it and all those fears were realized and reinforced in the process of making the movie. The genie’s out of the bottle, the monster’s out of the cage — it’s running rampant, and it’s out of their control.”

And White has no love lost for the tech companies running these platforms, either. “They have so much of our attention,” he says. “They have so much of our engagement. They have so much of our time. They’ve got billions, they’ve got trillions, they’ve changed the way our world works entirely. Where where are we going? I think that’s my question… and my fear.”

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White and Madison also talk about the secret to mastering Sorkinese, a.k.a. writer-director Aaron Sorkin‘s high-velocity style of dialogue (“the rhythm is certainly intense,” Madison says with a laugh); the pressure of playing real-life figures (something White is no stranger to); and the perils of being radicalized one post at a time. Also, did you know Mikey Madison is an Almost Famous superfan? She turns the tables with a few questions of her own about the thinly fictionalized story of Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe.

To watch Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison’s full Rolling Stone Studio interview, go to Rolling Stone’s YouTube channel, or just press play above.