The Social Reckoning review: Mark Zuckerberg indictment is ineffective and dated

Zuckerberg, as Sorkin’s famed screenplay and David Fincher’s searing gaze as director in The Social Network (2010) implied, doesn’t seem to be one to ever go down without a fight or second-guess himself in employing his craftiness, but that “professional defendant” moment relays a strong suggestion that this current version of the Facebook (now Meta) founder & CEO is much more unchecked and battle-ready than the college kid we met about sixteen years ago. A few billion dollars in the bank, a massive echo chamber of a company and a self-awarded sense of power that can make or break cultures and generations — this grown-up Zuckerberg might still be awkward as ever, but his appetite for control hasn’t dipped one bit.

Sorkin, therefore, returns with a new mission on his mind that yet again questions Zuckerberg’s morality, and even indicts him while at it, but through a completely different channel. If the previous iteration made his subject begrudgingly confront its dear ones (friends and co-founders), Sorkin now chooses to pit it against entities that he has little to no clue about, or frankly, has little to no interest in. Think about it: Would a person like Zuckerberg ever be bothered by an employee disgruntled by his company’s ethical misdeeds, or a journalist who wants to write a smear piece on how his algorithm is negatively influencing the world? He would rather dismiss them as petulant and stupid for complaining too much and castigating him for reasons they clearly don’t understand.

David vs Goliath story

But a reckoning is often one that comes from unexpected quarters and it took no less than a Facebook data scientist and a Wall Street Journal investigative journalist to spell it for Zuckerberg. It occurred at a time — less than a year after the 2020 US elections — when the social networking service had grown into a hydra, of sorts, with the entire world and its order in its tentacled grip; the people who engineered it had pushed the envelope way too far.

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Zuckerberg had arm-twisted his main men and women only a couple of years prior into optimising ‘meaningful social interactions’, or MSI, to counter the drop in the usage of his platform. A new set of metrics, then, allotted secret points to different interactions such as likes, comments or reshares to increase engagement. Outrage baits — such as hate comments and nasty posts about gender, ethnicities or political stances — are the obvious kinds to fetch most points and it takes no time for the world to accept the opportunity to spread misinformation, to be manipulated and to be divided.

“We are not the referee, we are the public square,” says the man himself to defend his dear platform’s role in all this, but Frances Haugen (the data scientist, played by Mikey Madison) and Jeff Horwitz (the investigative journalist, played by Jeremy Allen White) aren’t going to let him get away with those meek analogies. Especially not when his alleged oversight of responsibilities is being blamed for the worsening of the mental health of teenage girls and purportedly allowing human trafficking and drug cartels to use the network without much intervention. And this is to name just a few of those alleged real-world harms.

The Social Reckoning, then, is essentially a David vs Goliath story that chronicles Haugen and Horwitz’s combined ebbs-and-flows journey in tackling the giant. Haugen doesn’t want to hurt Facebook but to help it get back on track because this is a place where communication can be meaningful. Horwitz, in contrast, wants to chase the truth, but only through absolute legitimacy. For Sorkin, it’s a clash of collisions that has long defined his cadence and storytelling approach, exemplified by films such as A Few Good Men (1992) and Steve Jobs (2015) and network shows like The Newsroom (2012-14).

A too righteous attempt

Hyper-articulate characters that are always up for banter, witty one-liners that flow in a specific rhythm and interactions that are as self-aware as they are showy — Aaron Sorkin’s modus operandi finds itself in full action in The Social Reckoning, which sticks throughout to a surprisingly mellow temperament. The narrative is precise in what it wants to convey and it helps that the central performances are attuned to the musicality of it all. The antagonism, too, is characteristic of his writing style, in that it lends Zuckerberg a personality that cannot be liked, but can still be understood.

Jeremy Strong’s take on the character, which has already been iconised by Jesse Eisenberg, is particularly interesting here, considering how he portrays Zuckerberg as a man with restraint and a simultaneous childlike edge that cannot take no for an answer. The rest of the cast, including talented names such as Betty Gilpin and Billy Magnussen, however, gets the short end of the stick.

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Yet, The Social Reckoning comes across as a bit too righteous in its pursuit, causing it to never really utilise its material’s dramatic potential. On the one hand, it wrestles with the fact that stories of its kind are available in abundance out there, robbing it of the expected novelty. On the other, its curiosities and scope at large seem considerably minimal compared to its predecessor. It was the human conundrum — one that did not allow any character to get boxed into any clear category — and its objective, remorseless dissection by Fincher that allowed The Social Network to be an enduring paradox.

Sorkin’s attempt removes the psychological element almost entirely from the picture. What is left behind consequently is a bare-bones story that is earnest, no doubt, but without any allegorical complexity it ought to have. It has tropes that feel familiar and occasionally comforting - the dynamic between Haugen and Horwitz starkly resembling what Tom Cruise’s Kaffee and Demi Moore’s Galloway had going in A Few Good Men — as well as a methodology that isn’t constrained. But it lacks distinctness and an ambition to consider a reality that is frighteningly out of our grasp already. The real-life Frances Haugen once stated that Facebook must declare itself morally bankrupt and an accusation of that magnitude requires an incredibly penetrating probe. The Social Reckoning, though, lets it go with a mere slap on the wrist.