It is both ironic and a sad comment on what the modern internet has become that for many, the way you’ll come upon this review is via a Facebook post (even though the site now does its best to throttle the exposure of links to external sites). The erstwhile social media service has grown so ubiquitous that for many it has become their de facto experience of the web itself. Long having given up on the idea of connecting friends they are instead intent on serving users an endless feed of “content”, all of it provided to Facebook for free, and all of it determined by their proprietary algorithm to keep you glued to your screen for as long as possible. “So what?”, you might ask, “Media companies have been trying to keep us hooked for as long as paid advertising has existed.” You would have a point, but it’s what exactly Facebook winds up showing its users to keep them scrolling that has proven to be the real problem.

In 2019, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) makes contact with Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a member of the corporation’s Civic Integrity team. Her job is ostensibly to make sure that they are handling their increasing power and influence responsibly and trying their best to avoid causing harm, but while she desperately wants to believe in the company’s ability to be a force for good in the world, her superiors’ repeated refusals to even engage with a troubling report she produced is quickly disenfranchising her. She reaches out to Horwitz in the hopes that she can steer him towards her discovery, but he needs more information to build a story and she finds herself putting her career in ever greater jeopardy to help him get it.

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) is being prepped by crisis management consultant Raya (Wunmi Mosaku) for his imminent testimony before the US Senate. As she hits him with practice questions, former Facebook investor Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr)—there at her behest and to Zuckerberg’s great consternation—keeps interjecting, pointing out the ways that the company’s main service spreads misinformation, even accepting money to do so via misleading or outright false campaign ad placements. Zuck claims to be a “free speech absolutist” as a defense—something that neither technically applies to privately-owned platforms nor could be considered true given that they do in fact apply moderation over what users post—but Charlie continues to argue in favor of at least performing some amount of fact checking, a debate that gets interrupted by media relations exec Teddy Marks’ (Billy Magnussen) revelation of the Journal‘s intent to publish a scathing report on their practices and then by the onset of the January 6th attack on the Capitol building.

The game cast keep things interesting, even if Strong’s portrayal of Zuckerberg veers a bit too far towards caricature, combining with the script to remove almost all traces of humanity from him. Strong and Madison are compelling together though, sharing an easy chemistry that thankfully avoids becoming romantic—even if she is inexplicably made to wear slinky outfits for a surprising percentage of her screentime.

Sorkin remains a masterful screenwriter, if not still somewhat less successful as a director. For all his skill at transforming a seemingly complex subject into an easily digestible, effortlessly quippy, and highly entertaining story, he seems unable to give the visuals the same flair, with much of the film feeling more like an average prestige TV show than something you need to see in a cinema. That said, you should see this. Anyone aware of reality knows that the “reckoning” indicated by the title never really comes—if anything, Facebook seems to have only gotten worse—but this still does a good job of crystallizing one of the major reasons why things both on the app and in society at large have gotten the way they are. It won’t be easy for some of us, but The Social Reckoning could and should inspire more than a few app deletions. ★★★½

Rated R for language.