‘the Social Reckoning’ Doesn’t Fully Reckon With The Problem

The Social Reckoning (rated R for language) opens with a “prologue” in which a drunk white woman has an altercation with two minority police officers. The woman spews hateful and racist barbs at them and then films some of the encounter on her phone. She posts the video on Facebook as evidence of a “DEI cops” narrative; it goes viral, red meat for her right-wing audience.

We later find out this unnamed woman had been politically progressive just a few years earlier but was “radicalized” rightward by the Facebook algorithm, circa 2019–20. In a cringey moment near the film’s end, we see this woman show up again as part of the mob storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Writer and director Aaron Sorkin opens with this vignette to offer a case study of the real-world effects of the Facebook/Meta algorithms, which the movie goes on to explore in depth. But it’s noteworthy that the woman’s malformation online is depicted mostly as political, and in a “left to right” direction.

For Sorkin—who since The West Wing hasn’t hid his progressive politics—the primary problem with Facebook isn’t spiritual malformation but political radicalization (in one direction). And that’s precisely why this movie, a companion piece to 2010’s The Social Network (written by Sorkin but directed by David Fincher), lacks the potency of its predecessor.

While The Social Network felt ominous, youthful, cool, and philosophically incisive, The Social Reckoning feels less relevant and at times downright hokey (“She’s disrupting” is such a groaner line). Like Facebook in general—most heavily used by boomers, little used by Gen Z—the film feels disconnected from the next-gen technological zeitgeist.

Like Facebook in general—most heavily used by boomers, little used by Gen Z—the film feels disconnected from the next-gen technological zeitgeist.

It’s not that the concerns Sorkin raises aren’t real problems. They are. It’s that his film frames the problems politically in a way that reduces their full scale and oversimplifies potential solutions. In a way, Sorkin falls prey to the problematic dynamics his movie points out. Social algorithms have trained us to filter all reality through the lens of our entrenched political narrative. In his telling of the Facebook story, Sorkin does this too.

Old-Fashioned Whistleblower Drama

The Social Reckoning follows a familiar whistleblower narrative in which Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) teams up with Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) to expose Facebook for knowingly hiding its platforms’ negative societal effects. Haugen secretly leaks internal documents that help Horwitz stand up his story, a series of articles that became known as “The Facebook Files.”

Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg (taking over from Jesse Eisenberg, who played “Zuck” in The Social Network but declined Sorkin’s invitation to reprise the role) with a cold, robotic detachment that feels unhelpfully caricatured. While Haugen and Horwitz are portrayed as heroic, Woodward and Bernstein–type Davids to the proverbial Goliath, Zuckerberg comes across as the consummate corporate villain—always prioritizing profits even if it harms users. It all feels too simple.

Platforms, Not Referees

While the investigative-journalism plot is occasionally compelling, the standout scenes in The Social Reckoning are the moments of verbal sparring (Sorkin’s creative forte) in which Zuckerberg debates others about the nature of free speech and corporate responsibility.

Zuckerberg calls himself a “free-speech absolutist” and says of his platforms (Facebook and Instagram), “We are a corkboard. We don’t care about what people pin to it.” He cites Section 230 of U.S. federal law, which protects online platforms and websites from being held liable for content posted by users or third parties.

Zuckerberg refuses calls to fact-check political ads on Facebook or play referee in determining what content is or isn’t allowed. “Facebook isn’t the ref!” he says at one point. “We’re the public square.”

But his critics—chiefly a former advisor, Charlie (Bill Burr)—push back, arguing that the Facebook algorithms, especially once optimized for “meaningful social interaction (MSI),” are a “firehose of bad information” that is “becoming jet-powered, hydraulic.”

Charlie tells Zuckerberg his platform is “commoditizing gullability” (great phrase!) and irresponsibly profiting from algorithms that accelerate misinformation, outrage, conspiracy theories, and radicalization.

“You’re like a crossing guard standing in front of a school but you’re not doing anything with your arms,” Charlie says. “So the cars are just plowing down the children.”

In another scene, Haugen describes how the initial promise of Facebook was “democratization” and “giving everyone a voice,” to which Horwitz responds, “While we all have a voice, not everybody deserves a microphone.” He cites the importance of credentials (e.g., being a trained journalist) and echoes some of what Tom Nichols laments in his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise.

But while the problems of an unrefereed online world, fueled by problematic algorithms, are readily apparent in The Social Reckoning, the solutions aren’t.

Who Decides Who Gets the Microphone?

It may be true that “not everybody deserves a microphone,” but who gets to make that determination? Sorkin may be implicitly suggesting government as a solution, in the form of tighter regulation and content policing. But he and everyone else would only want his “side” of the government to play this role—and it’d inevitably devolve into partisan censorship.

What if Facebook and similar platforms were forced to play the “ref” role themselves? Would abolishing Section 230 and making tech platforms more responsible for the “microphone” question solve the problem? No. This would put huge amounts of power into the hands of a few inherently biased folks, whose determinations for what’s permissible and not would be arbitrary.

Any form of censorship or content suppression—even under the guise of “fact checkers”—has limited value and often backfires, planting seeds of suspicion and fueling conspiracy theories. Adding to the problem is the reality that on more than one occasion, the “credentialed“ or “gatekeeper” media class has been wrong and perpetuated falsehoods, while the much-ridiculed “conspiracy theorists” (say, about the COVID-19 lab leak theory) may have been right.

Yes, the “everyone has a microphone” problem creates chaos. But the chaos is most problematic not because it’s politically combustible (which it is) but because it’s epistemologically corrosive. The erratic discursive dynamics wrought by social algorithms erode trust, impair critical thinking, prey on fears (doomscrolling), and warp our souls.

All of us are being formed in these ways—not just people of a certain political persuasion.

Problem on Left and Right

This is an obvious obfuscation in The Social Reckoning, which notably climaxes on January 6. All Sorkin’s examples of algorithm-driven radicalization happen with people being made extremely right-wing. Set in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film shows a belligerent woman in a grocery checkout line refusing to wear a mask and a San Francisco tech bro citing an erroneous online theory.

On more than one occasion, the ‘credentialed’ media class has been wrong and perpetuated falsehoods.

But what about the many progressives radicalized further left by their own bubbles of pandemic misinformation (some of whom still wear masks outdoors, six years later)? Why doesn’t the film acknowledge any examples of left-wing extremists whose algorithmic formation radicalized them into violence (e.g., the three would-be assassins of President Trump, or Charlie Kirk’s assassin)?

Social media algorithms radicalize people on all sides. It’s a bipartisan problem, which means any political solution would need to be bipartisan. But unless we’re talking about age-verification laws narrowly aimed at protecting children, I don’t think politics will be the most effective avenue for addressing the ongoing social media (and now AI) problems.

Bottom-Up Wisdom, Not Top-Down Censorship

Even if greater government regulations are imposed on tech companies, ultimately the most effective agent of change will be pressure from the marketplace and shifting public opinion.

We’ve started to see this over the last few years, as influential books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, or Freya India’s recent Girls®, present sobering accounts of just how bad the effects of these technologies have been—particularly on young people. More and more schools are going tech-light or tech-free, encouraged by organizations like the recently launched Center for Responsible Technology. This summer’s Toy Story 5 showed how skepticism toward tech has become the norm—especially among millennial and Gen-Z parents.

As part of its recent $17 billion settlement of a lawsuit over the harmful effects of its products for young people, Meta made a number of positive changes to how young people interact with Facebook and Instagram. Legal and public-opinion pressures can actually effect change.

But it’s not just a young-people problem. Boomer grandparents are arguably the ones being most malformed by Facebook these days. So “protecting the youth” initiatives only help solve one facet of the problem.

Ultimately, the best guard against the worst harms of these platforms is the wisdom of people who use them. This is where church leaders and Christian influencers can make an important difference—by discipling people of all ages toward wisdom in their everyday scrolling habits.

Ultimately, the best guard against the worst harms of these platforms is the wisdom of people who use them.

This is what we’ve tried to do at The Gospel Coalition with book projects like Scrolling Ourselves to Death and the just-published AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity. From phone idolatry to AI companions to the crisis of reading, we routinely examine the implications of these technologies in hopes of giving tools for wisdom in the digital age.

But more than just warning about the spiritual dangers of screens, algorithms, and AI, it’s also vital to make a positive case for offline life and real human connection. How can we give young people today a vision for life more compelling than bingeing “content” online and getting sucked into algorithm-fueled, mind-numbing scrolling? At a time when most young people readily admit their phones mostly push AI slop and “brain rot,” it seems like they’re hungry for alternatives. That’s what I tried to offer in The Wisdom Pyramid: ideas for how to feed your soul with more nourishment than scrolling junk food.

Rather than regulating the platforms, we ought to focus on retraining user affections. How can we encourage one another to get offline and go outside, to chat with friends face-to-face rather than via Instagram DMs? To love the local, embodied, and real more than whatever dopamine delusions the algorithm produces?

The Social Reckoning—much like the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma—is stronger on naming problems than offering solutions. The greater “reckoning” with these technologies will be the work we all take up, every day, in homes and churches and classrooms and coffee shops, spurring each other to take back life from the algorithm.