16 years after the brilliant “The Social Network”, Aaron Sorkin returns to the target rich field of social media to once again take on Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. This time he also takes on the responsibility of directing the film as well as writing it, and that may have just been a little out of his reach. This is not a bad film, in fact in some ways it’s quite good, but for all of the supposed political impact that the subject matter is supposed to have, Aaron Sorkin takes a swing, and misses.
The whole point of this movie is to gin up outrage about the algorithms that lead to promoting hateful clickbait on the social media sites. Sorkin really wants to tie this into the January 6th riot at the Capitol. The problem is, for all of the work that goes into explaining the technical aspects of data analytics, there’s almost no demonstration that the algorithm under criticism had anything to do with the events of that day. The only connection seems to be that President Trump had a video available and that Facebook took it down, but we never see what was in the video, and there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that Trump kept advocating for a peaceful protest not the insurrection that the credentialed class keeps trying to validate.Opinions being treated like facts is the very thing that this movie is supposed to be about.
“The Social Network” was a film about the origins of the most powerful social media platform in the world., that there was deception and betrayal along the way was what made it a fascinating story. Let’s face it, origin stories can be quite interesting. “The Social Reckoning” on the other hand, takes us into an existing world and tries to show that that view of the world that is so negative is partially the fault of this new medium. That’s a conclusion that probably everybody accepts before we even think about the film’s content. I doubt that you will find many people who deny that the influence of social media can be extremely harmful, duh. That takes a lot of suspense out of the story even though it is a procedural about a whistleblower and a journalist trying to reveal insider knowledge about the mechanisms of Facebook.
Mickey Madison plays the part of a data engineer, Frances Haugen, at Facebook who is responsible for monitoring civic engagement. She’s prompted to investigate after seeing a video shared online of a woman speaking extremist views and behaving abrasively while believing that she is in the right. The data that she pursues suggests a strong link between Facebook’s meaningful social interaction index and attraction to extremist views. Of course nobody at the company listens to her, and Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as an even more robotic automaton than he was in the previous film.
I have not studied extensive film of Zuckerberg, so I can’t say authoritatively that this portrayal is inaccurate, it just feels a little over the top. Jeremy Strong replaces Jesse Eisenberg as the CEO of Meta. His main strength as an actor in this film is an inability to express anything on his face. So that is apparently a characteristic of the real Zuckerberg. We see several scenes where PR experts are trying to turn Zuckerberg into a human being for public hearings. The idea that they are struggling to make him appear human is funny, but it’s a sidetrack from the main purpose of the film which is to explain how Facebook’s algorithm is screwing up the world, oh and it’s Zuckerberg’s fault.
Jeremy Allen White plays the journalist from The Wall Street Journal who is working on the story, but is not really a tech writer. Regardless of whether it is true in real life, this does allow our two main protagonists to engage in frequent exposition which explains things to those of us in the audience who are not used to doing a deep data dive online. This is also an old trick of Sorkin from his days on The West Wing, where a character would plead ignorance in regard to a subject, typically it was CJ the character played by Alison Janney, who then has to have somebody explain what the hell is happening. You don’t really get the walk and talk in this film like we got in the TV series, we just get the talk.
One of the things that’s missing from this film that made its predecessor so effective is a score from Trent Reznor. The music of “The Social Network” was designed to set a mood and it was nearly another character in the film. Alexandre Desplat , has created a score that feels like it’s transition material between exposition rather than setting the mood for the exposition. There’s nothing wrong with the music, it’s just that it doesn’t work in the same way, and it’s noticeable.
I think there are certainly issues with how social media works that deserves attention, but our screenwriter here is so concerned with the political ramifications that he ignores the everyday consequences of this sort of negative reinforcement. There are a couple of times when those effects are mentioned, but we never follow up on them, we just keep coming back to the same statistical point that our whistleblower character has been emphasizing from the beginning. We could use a little bit more context for that 64% figure that she keeps throwing around. And does anybody really find it surprising that people who watch a media post that is hate based follow up by looking at hate based groups? Here’s a big reveal, water is wet.
The movie plays like a detective story told out of sequence and that structure is so ubiquitous nowadays I’m not sure it helped with this story. For example there are several references made to misinformation or outright lies being told during covid period. But because of the agenda of the screenwriter, we ignore the fact that the checks that were in place largely suppressed not bad information, but valid criticisms covid policy. Outright lies were told by the medical establishment in order to get people to comply with what they thought was the best advice, and then we were ignoring criticism of that advice.
The movie wants to have it both ways, it wants to defend free speech but it wants to do so by suggesting that somebody should be regulating that speech. There is an analogy concerning a crossing guard in the story, but this is a weak comparison. Information on Facebook is not like a traffic pattern that threatens to run over kids, it’s more like a form of consumer reports being used by shoppers as they make their choices in the grocery store. The hyperbole suggests that somebody’s going to die because of this misinformation, but that’s not where the story is. Where is the data that proves that? Instead we get scenes of the melee at the Capitol back in 2021, without any connection to a media post or group which were the things that this film was criticizing in the first place.
This is a well-made piece of agitprop, but since it contains misleading information itself, it feels a little bit hypocritical. As an example, the film passes on an apocryphal story about changing the rugs in the capital because of blood stains from Capital police officers who were injured on January 6th. That story has been debunked, but apparently it makes a good point for the plot, so we’re going to ignore the fact that it is as dubious as the things that are suggested by the screenwriter. I’m not buying it, and it doesn’t look like anybody else is either.
