Source: The Conversation – UK
In 2010, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network charted the birth of social media. Sixteen years later his sequel, The Social Reckoning, is tracing the mutation of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg in the first film and Jeremy Strong in this sequel) from an awkward nerd into a sinister billionaire.
It’s a remarkable film. But Sorkin’s obsession with his monstrous characterisation of Zuckerberg at times obscures the hideousness of the social media business model.
In The Social Network, Eisenberg brilliantly played the young Zuckerberg as super smart, conflicted and socially awkward as he channelled his frustration with Harvard girls into the misogynistic attractiveness-rating site FaceMash. Zuckerberg initially resisted commercialisation, fearing The Facebook would lose its cool. But by the film’s end, he was shown to have betrayed his friends to launch Facebook into Silicon Valley’s techno-capitalist machine.
The Social Reckoning follows Zuckerberg to the Valley, but summons a very different beast. This time, Sorkin writes and directs, pushing his depiction of Zuckerberg to the limit.
Method actor Strong steps confidently into Eisenberg’s shoes. At one point, his Zuckerberg admits that his media portrayal hurts his wife and kids. It’s a rare glimpse of empathy in an otherwise Zodiac-like performance. Eisenberg, it seems, had run out of that. Sorkin says he declined the role because “he just doesn’t like being conflated with Mark Zuckerberg anymore”.
By the end of the events depicted in The Social Network, Facebook had amassed over 500 million users. The Reckoning begins with 2.3 billion – more than the population of any country. As Zuckerberg declares in the film, Facebook is “post-government”, beyond conventional regulatory frames. This is the new world – one increasingly shaped by big tech billionaire oligarchs, who line up on the White House lawn alongside President Donald Trump.
The Meta business model is depicted as hiding behind the language of connection. Even whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), the product manager and data engineer who leaked thousands of internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal in 2021, is seen to remain devoted to this cause. She “loves Facebook”. She “believes in its mission to connect”. The film tells us that workers learn the refrain from the get-go, then sign NDAs when the ideological mask slips to reveal the ugly business beneath.
The Social Reckoning reflects a world increasingly managed by Silicon Valley logic. HR managers tell Haugen: “Don’t be the friction.” When Haugen leaks research on Instagram’s damaging effects on teenagers’ mental health, we are shown how toxic leadership has become a contagion, spreading from the platform into personal lives. And when the ideology starts to unravel, another monster appears.
Zuckerberg calls in a crisis PR consultant (a stunning performance by Wunmi Mosaku) to coach him through the Senate hearings. The advice? Look them in the eye and repeat: “We are aware of that problem and currently doing something about it.” A month after the Wall Street Journal published “The Facebook Files”, Facebook changed its name to Meta.
Virality
Depending on your political persuasion, you might find some sympathy for Zuckerberg’s rationale: simply connecting people is virtuous, but protecting unchecked free speech is fundamental, at any cost. But that is also the film’s problem. It fixates on Zuckerberg as the ultimate villain, even though it exposes other horrors behind the scenes.
As set out in my book A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media, I have some direct experience of this pernicious business model. In 2012, shortly after publishing my social theory of virality/growth, which argues that emotions, feelings and affects, more than rational choice, drives what goes viral online, I was invited by a social media start-up to meet its visiting US CEO.
I politely explained that the book was a sociological account of virality, not a guide to growth. The emails stopped. The company wasn’t Facebook, but the anecdote captures something crucial about the unfolding catastrophes of social media: when platform growth depends on virality, the content matters less than its velocity.
In 2018, Facebook claimed that tackling passive consumption and outrage-bait required supercharging its engagement system around “meaningful social interactions” (MSI). But, as Haugen reveals to Horwitz in the film, MSI did nothing to resolve the underlying problem: profit remained ahead of public safety.
Research at the WSJ warned that the system would amplify harmful and divisive content. Yet MSI remained an engagement-optimisation system, ranking what users were most likely to react to, share and discuss — including misinformation, conspiracy theories, race hate and political polarisation.
Facebook did not always hide its research from public scrutiny. Its controversial 2014 study with Cornell University academics experimented with emotional contagion, showing that the company already understood how positive and negative content could spread through its platform. Engagement and outrage were not simply unforeseen side effects of social media.
The Social Reckoning’s reliance on the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” reopens the growing abyss between what Meta knows and what it is prepared to do about it.
The film confronts some recent political viruses: misinformation, polarisation, COVID, Trump and the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Indeed, Sorkin blames Meta directly for the Capitol insurrection.
The question is whether the same addictive interactions that took Facebook from Harvard dorms to 3.6 billion users across Meta’s platforms have become machinery for the destruction of western democracy. The films ends with Zuckerberg watching events at Capitol Hill unfold in the Facebook war room. Should he pull the plug?
As lawsuits mount and new whistleblowers emerge, what will happen to Silicon Valley’s corporate monstrosities? Like most horror franchises, expect more sequels.
Tony D Sampson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/08/the-social-reckoning-is-a-true-american-horror-story/