The Social Reckoning – review by Anthony Nanson

I’ve noticed quite a bit of negative reviewing of Aaron Sorkin’s new film, The Social Reckoning, including on major media outlets. Do they want people not to go and see it? I saw the film – with only four other people in the cinema – on its last night in my home town and found it both eye-opening and very moving. It follows the true story of Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s leaking of inside information – the ‘Facebook Files’ – to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. The crux of the story is that Facebook deliberately deployed algorithms that they knew would promote toxic thinking, because these particular algorithms would maximise engagement and thus make more money.

The film illustrates the linkage between this dynamic and various antisocial effects such as self-harm and bullying among teenagers, covid misinformation, and far-right radicalism, including racial hatred and the mob invasion of Congress on 6 January 2021. For me, it shed light on how people can slide into what Naomi Klein calls (in Doppelganger) the ‘mirrorworld’ of believing things that are the converse of reality.

Haugen’s information demonstrates statistically that social media like Facebook and Instagram have been instrumental in the mass production of delusion. Haugen was motivated to begin talking to Horwitz by the radicalisation of an old friend of hers via Facebook’s recommendation of far-right sites. What’s missing here, and remains something of a mystery for Klein too, is what is happening psychologically along the way. How does brainwashing via algorithmically mediated information actually happen? How does it feel to someone undergoing it? This contemporary phenomenon has differences from as well as parallels with the more centrally controlled brainwashing of people through techniques of repetition employed in state propaganda for more than a century, most intensively in authoritarian states.

The film presents Mark Zuckerberg’s management of his company as authoritarian in that he won’t listen to what he doesn’t want to hear and his employees know not to make a fuss if they want to keep their job. But the Facebook employees are ‘alphas’, to use Aldous Huxley’s term in Brave New World: they know what’s going on; they’re not the ones being brainwashed. So another kind of story that could be told is the personal journey of that friend of Haugen’s from a reasonable human being into someone who, at the start of the film, yells racist abuse at two black police officers at the same time as she tries to frame them on Facebook as behaving aggressively towards her.

Meanwhile do go and see The Social Reckoning, whose two main characters are very sympathetically played by Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White. Haugen is played as having some form of neurodivergency, evident in her combative manner of conversing with Horwitz, especially with respect to his initially limited knowledge of tech. What I found so moving is her willingness as a vulnerable employee, early in her career, to risk everything by whistleblowing what's going on with Facebook.