Aaron Sorkin's new film The Social Reckoning dramatizes how Facebook civic integrity product manager Frances Haugen leaked internal documents, but it takes liberties with the dialogue and the order of events. The movie, which Sorkin both directed and wrote as a semi-follow-up to 2010's The Social Network, depicts Haugen providing a trove of material to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, leading to the 2021 series called The Facebook Files. In both the film and real life, the leaks resulted in Haugen testifying as a congressional whistleblower, and the movie's closing frames note that she later spoke before governments worldwide and bolstered lawsuits against Meta nationwide using the communications she disclosed.
The clearest deviation is the timeline. Sorkin compressed events and moved major moments forward by several months, placing Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's preparation for a congressional hearing on misinformation and extremism on the same day Horwitz prepared to publish the first Facebook Files report, January 6, 2021, during the insurrection at the US Capitol. In reality, Zuckerberg testified before the House alongside other tech CEOs in March 2021, and the first Facebook Files installment did not appear until that September. Meta declined to comment on the film.
The film draws directly on Horwitz's investigation and Haugen's documents, which showed inconsistent application of content moderation policies, algorithms that drove users toward hate groups, and weak responses to apparent human trafficking on the platform. Meta has previously described the documents and the Facebook Files recounting as cherry-picked to serve a narrative. On a 2021 earnings call, Zuckerberg called the reporting a coordinated effort to use leaked documents selectively to paint a false picture of the company, saying the questions involved impossible tradeoffs about balancing difficult social values.
The movie's Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, says she believes in Facebook, echoing a message the real Haugen posted on the company's internal message board before her last day in May 2021, according to the Journal. She wrote that she did not hate Facebook but loved it and wanted to save it, a sentiment Haugen attributed to watching a family friend become radicalized online, which she said motivated her to join the civic integrity team. A fictionalized opening scene in the film shows a friend from spin class arrested after posting a video, radicalized by conspiracy theories after the progressive candidate she campaigned for lost.
One revelation in the film is that 64 percent of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook were sent there by its algorithm, a statistic that formed the basis of a May 2020 Journal article by Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman. That article cited a 2016 internal presentation finding that 64 percent of all extremist group joins stemmed from the company's recommendation tools, which the presentation said grow the problem. A Facebook spokesperson told the Journal at the time that the company had strengthened protections and was not the same company.
The film also examines Facebook's 2018 shift to ranking content by Meaningful Social Interactions rather than likes. Haugen and Horwitz work out that the system weighted emoji reactions and reshares more heavily than likes, and that Zuckerberg and other executives knew it would promote rage-sharing. Zuckerberg had promoted the change as a correction to public content crowding out personal moments, predicting it would hurt engagement but benefit the community and business long term. A 2021 Facebook Files installment by Horwitz and Keach Hagey found employees warned that prioritizing MSI promoted angrier engagement, and that misinformation, toxicity, and violent content were inordinately prevalent among reshares. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the Journal that a ranking change was not the source of the world's divisions.
A thumb drive shared with Haugen in the film contains a study on how Instagram harms teenage girls' body image, with a colleague urging her to publicize it before the company marketed Instagram Kids. The colleague's existence is unclear, but the material appears based on an internal study finding that 32 percent of surveyed teen girls who felt bad about their bodies felt worse after using Instagram. Instagram had planned a service for children under 13 and announced it was pausing the effort shortly amid the uproar from the Facebook Files release.
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