In the new Aaron Sorkin biopic The Social Reckoning, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen nervously waits for her turn at the mic, shuffling through notecards at a 2019 company-wide meeting. As a member of Facebook’s civic integrity team, Haugen is eager to present her findings: that Facebook’s algorithm is radicalizing users towards engaging with extremist groups. She earnestly believes, at the time, that the company—with a noble mission of connecting the world—would take action.
However, before Haugen can approach the mic and ask her questions, a bro-y public relations executive—played by actor Billy Magnussen, looking like the perfect asshole-henchman—abruptly ends the meeting and closes it to employee questions. For the next portion of the film, Haugen tries to make her research known with little tact, feeling uncomfortably like a tone-deaf righteous thorn in the side of her colleagues.
At the start of the film, Frances Haugen—played by Anora’s Mikey Madison, who is impressive in her range from sex worker to data analyst—does not see herself as a whistleblower. Even when she responds to an inquiry from a dogged and slightly disheveled Wall Street Journal reporter, she makes it known to him that she is not on the reporter’s side, that she loves her job and the company’s mission.
But over time, Haugen’s illusions about Facebook’s mission and vision are chipped away at. In one of the film’s scenes, Mark Zuckerberg—played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong—is seen sitting in a sterile glass conference room containing a bulletproof couch. The civic integrity team arrives to give a presentation about reducing harmful engagement. Zuckerberg icily tells the presenter to skip to the end—and then pushes back when they share that their strategy would lead to 1% less engagement on the platform. When it’s clear this team will not meet his numbers goal, nods at one of his handlers to remove these people from the room.
For much of the film, Haugen goes back-and-forth with Jeff Horwitz, a tenacious journalist played by Jeremy Allen White. Horwitz, historically a political reporter, convinced the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau chief that they should tackle Facebook not from a tech lens, but a political one.
After learning of Haugen’s “civil integrity” team and determining that the employees there might feel unheard amid growing desires, Horwitz reaches out to several. He gets one nervous bite from a ProtonMail account, and behind it is Haugen. Over time, seeing the fissures in what she thought Facebook was, and watching the “civil integrity” team dissolve, Haugen opens up to Horwitz’s inquiries. Eventually, she shares internal documents, gains whistleblower status, and testifies in front of Congress.
Among the internal intelligence from Haugen: Facebook’s obsession with a “Meaningful Social Interactions” metric (known internally as MSI) was driving people towards fringe and extremist groups. In addition, the mental health of teenage girls was plummeting as a result of Instagram, according to company research. All of this became known as the Facebook Files, and when published, it won Horwitz a Pulitzer.
Nothing in the film is totally revelatory—especially if you’ve been following the flurry of lawsuits filed against Meta as of late, which equate Meta’s addictive features to that of Big Tobacco. Perhaps this is why the film has flopped in the box offices, grossing only $5.5 million this past weekend against a budget that’s in the $30–42 million range.
Or maybe the flop can be attributed to people’s general fatigue with megalomaniac oligarchs. (Fatigue is, of course, a feature of fascistic cultures.)
Overall, I enjoyed the film’s depiction of Facebook’s crisis communications executives and corporate trainers. Magnussen’s character seethes at Horwitz when they meet, predictably threatening that Haugen’s life will be destroyed. And there is an excellent scene during Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony prep where he is confronted by an investor played by Bill Burr (in real-life, the character is an investor named Roger McNamee, and in 2018 he wrote a piece entitled: I was Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor. Today I’d tell him, your users are in peril). As the fictionalized investor tries to convince Zuckerberg to fact-check political ads, an emotionless Zuck tries to shame the investor for only making $250 million from a $2.5 million investment when he could have made over a billion.
While all of this may seem par for the course of a ruthless, efficiency-optimizing CEO of a multi-trillion-dollar company beholden to shareholder capitalism, I wish the film focused more on *why* Zuckerberg bulldozed over Haugen’s concerns.
In this essay from David Kushner, a reporter who interviewed Zuckerberg back in 2004, Kushner pinpoints the Meta chief’s motivation and wishes it was more central to the film. From Kushner’s piece: “I want to know that when I build something,” he told me back then, “I’m going to get gratification out of it. A lot of the time I make it for myself, because it’s something that I want.”
That line, as a standalone statement, sounds somewhat benign—not like a villainous mastermind wanting to avenge his awkward or nerdy younger years by becoming omnipotent in media, commerce, culture, and connectivity.
However, when you go deeper, there is something fundamentally wrong with simply wanting to build things for fun without any maintenance of it all. Whether it’s rating women’s attractiveness, riding around on rocketships, or tinkering with a metaverse, there seems to be a universal desire of these immortality-seeking tech CEOs to “build” as a form of personal entertainment.
And it’s both solipsistic and nihilistic. It’s building something simply to fulfill one’s own personal pleasure—as if that’s all that exists. And it’s fundamentally believing that humans will engage in their fun toys, because we’re just monkey brains who they can manipulate into using the next fun thing.
Haugen’s disclosures certainly contributed to our reality of how addictive and inflammatory Facebook’s products are. (The film ends with footage of January 6thinsurrectionists—emboldened by online rhetoric, trampling the guards and storming the Capitol.)
This wasn’t a film about Zuck, Sorkin already made that. However, coming out of the film, my most pressing question remained: why are people in positions of power not moved by Haugen’s disclosures? As Facebook investor McNamee writes in his aforementioned Guardian op-ed, it’s certainly a corporate governance issue. But it’s also boys with toys. I suppose, when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.
What else we’re paying attention to this week…
Following several settled lawsuits related to the suicides of teen users on its platform, Character.AI is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company previously let young people develop chat relationships with chatbots modeled after celebrities or fictional characters.
Silicon Valley workers have long resisted unions, but the intrusion of AI into tech workplaces may be changing that.
OpenAI’s former safety lead on AI and writing: “You know, in math and in coding, you can tell whether the answer is right or not. But when it comes to something like writing, it’s much harder for a machine to tell the difference between good writing and bad writing. It really struggles with theory of mind, with understanding where the reader or, I guess, in your case, the listener is coming from. And look, maybe AI will get better at those things too. But I don’t think we’re sure just yet.”
Claude submitted a fake tip about an unsolved Philadelphia murder suspect, claiming to have seen the person who matched the homicide department’s description. The tip was flagged as spam and never reached detectives.
Ahead of the midterms, Elon Musk has funneled $276 million into Republican races. Alex Gibney’s documentary, Musk, goes in depth into Musk’s desire to control outcomes of elections after feeling snubbed by the Biden administration.