Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Social Network,” says that he wasn’t looking to make another movie about Facebook after the critical and commercial success of the 2010 movie, which was directed with great panache by David Fincher.
Looking for a new project, he met Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower whose disclosures raised concerns about the impact on health, safety and global politics of the company’s social media platforms.
The story he crafted, The Social Reckoning, premiered at the New York Film Fest, and hit theaters in the U.S. on Friday, October 9.
“I was looking for a good story, and after a period of about a year of just a major writer’s block, of not being able to come up with any idea, I met Frances Haugen, and suddenly a good story started to take shape in my head,” Sorkin, who also directed the movie, said.
The Social Network, released in 2010, told the origin story of Facebook, which has since changed its name to Meta, and starred Jesse Eisenberg as the ambitious founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The new movie centers on Haugen and journalist Jeff Horwitz, who wrote a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal called “The Facebook Files,” which began in 2021 and was based on numerous documents that she had provided to him.
Two Davids
“It is a David and Goliath story, except that there are two Davids,” Sorkin said. “One is Frances, who picks up a rock and throws it at Facebook. The other is print journalism, which picks up a bigger rock and throws it at tech.
Horwitz, who later detailed the story in his 2023 book “Broken Code,” now works as an investigative journalist. His reports exposed how Meta permitted its chatbots to engage in provocative behavior and earned billions in revenue from fraudulent ads.
Sony Pictures bought the rights to his life story in connection to his previous Facebook reporting when he was employed by the Wall Street Journal.
The Social Reckoning is a fictionalized account of events, and it does not only draw upon Horwitz’s reporting about Facebook, Instagram or Meta.
The story begins with Haugen meeting Horwitz in December 2020. Initially, she is reluctant to go public, but ultimately she concludes that the revelations will be more powerful with her name attached to it, and decides to speak on record.
She also testifies before Congress about her belief that Facebook’s algorithm was deliberately boosting divisive contents in order to pursue big profits.
When Haugen testified, the company disagreed with her characterization of how it operated. Zuckerberg defended the company in a Facebook post, writing that “the argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical.”
In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade or so to strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram under a settlement with U.S. states.
But the company denied any wrongdoing, claiming that ensuring that teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms was an “absolute imperative” for them.
Zuckerberg, a supporting character in The Social Reckoning, is played this time by actor Jeremy Strong, best known for the TV series Succession.
Meanwhile, Eisenberg, who declined the chance to reprise the role, has been focused on developing a career as a filmmaker (his second directorial effort, The Debut, starring Julianne Moore, played the festival route).
Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) portrays Horwitz, and Haugen is played by Mikey Madison, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as a sex worker in Anora.
While Horwitz wasn’t involved in the film’s production and had no say over its content, he did meet with Sorkin and answered his questions about the reporting process and his relationship with Haugen.
Sorkin told Horwitz that he’d need to change some chronology and details to make work the story he had in mind. Horwitz did not read the script until it was completed.
“It was definitely going to be an ‘inspired by, not based on’ situation,” Sorkin says. He insists that major facts of the story are accurate, although he had to create conversations and a timeline to make a more compelling narrative from a cinematic perspective.
Painting Vs. Photograph
“People don’t live their lives in a series of scenes that form a coherent narrative by the end. People don’t speak in clear dialogue. Those are things that playwrights and screenwriters do,” Sorkin said. “What you do as a journalist, that’s a photograph, what I do is a painting.”
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