I was not expecting that I would enjoy The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's upcoming film about how evil Facebook is. It's a sequel of sorts to The Social Network (2010)—an enjoyable but flawed and unfair portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—and focuses on the so-called Facebook Papers, which most people barely remember, but involved whistleblower Frances Haugen publicly revealing that the company knew its social media products were harming some users (mostly teenage girls on Instagram). At the time of this news cycle, I deemed it a "big fat nothingburger," given the weakness of the evidence.
Sorkin—whose own politics seem to fall mostly in line with the sort of overly idealistic, bland do-something liberalism that typified The West Wing, his best known piece of entertainment—is a passionate detractor of Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2019, Sorkin went so far as to write an open letter to Zuckerberg (in the form of a column for The New York Times, of course), in which he accused Facebook of "assaulting the truth." Over the course of the last two decades, from Network to Reckoning, Sorkin's nuanced but mostly negative representation of social media and its impact on society has yielded to Jonathan Haidt-esque blind hatred; his forthcoming depiction of Zuckerberg (now portrayed by Jeremy Strong rather than Jesse Eisenberg) is intended as one-dimensional cartoon villainy.
