The Social Reckoning ★★★

Released: 9 October 2026

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Starring: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen

It’s fair to say ever since David Fincher’s masterpiece The Social Network was released, social media has become an intrinsic part of modern life. This ubiquity can offer benefits such as staying in contact with family and friends alongside keeping up to date with what’s going on in each other’s lives. However, these platforms also have a dark side where users can become addicted. Hours upon hours spent scrolling through feeds, using them as a source from which to get their news, and as we have seen all too recently, becoming radicalised to the point where people begin to spread dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories which tear at the fabric of our society. A decade and a half after winning an Oscar for the screenplay that explored Facebook’s origins and rise, Aaron Sorkin steps up to write and direct this timely companion piece, examining the gargantuan behemoth the company has become and the chaos it has unleashed on our world.

It’s 2019, and Frances Haugen (Madison) is a data engineer working for Facebook’s Civic Integrity Team. She is steadfast in her belief in the social media giant’s core goal of connecting people around the world, but this begins to erode when she sees firsthand the damage the company she works for is causing. People are becoming radicalised by the content they see on the platform, misinformation left unchecked and allowed to spread, fuelling hatred and division across the world, all the more damaging considering the world was on the cusp of a devastating global pandemic. Meanwhile, the company executives and senior leadership know about this but choose to prioritise profit and engagement over user safety and wellbeing. Growing increasingly disillusioned, Frances meets investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Allen White), who has taken on the tech beat for The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco Bureau. Despite understandable concerns about blowing the whistle on her employer and potentially putting a target on her back, given the company’s enormous power, Haugen works with Horwitz to leak information in what would become known as The Facebook Files.

It isn’t exactly news that in the years since Haugen blew the whistle, tech moguls continue to wield troubling amounts of power and influence. If anything, since then, their power has only grown. Therefore, it’s easy to see what drew Sorkin back to this story of uber-rich megalomaniacs spearheading social media giants and cosying up to some of the worst people to hold elected office in the world’s most powerful democracy. Sorkin’s script brings his signature fast-paced dialogue and, instead of looking at it through the lens of how personal ambition can absolutely destroy business and personal relationships, frames it through an investigative journalism lens as Haugen grapples with the true extent to which her employer is fully aware of the damage it is doing to stoke hatred and toxicity in our society, but chooses to brush it under the carpet, despite the very real harm it is doing to its users’ mental health.

In her first role since her Oscar-winning turn in Anora, Madison anchors the film with a quiet but fiercely determined performance. Her shift from an outgoing, extroverted stripper to a far more withdrawn, introverted data engineer who prefers her own company demonstrates Madison’s remarkable versatility. At first, she is understandably hesitant and petrified to meet Horwitz, worried a co-worker might see her, which could attract her bosses’ ire and force her out of a job. Yet, thanks to Horwitz’s calm, unflappable demeanour, and a fear that the company will axe her role anyway, she builds an uneasy relationship with the investigative journalist and gradually uses the information she has to build the story into a damning exposé of what has since become a trillion-dollar company and the man who built it from his Harvard dorm room.

Speaking of which, in replacing Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook’s founder, the geeky, socially awkward portrayal of Zuckerberg that Eisenberg gave us is gone. In his place, Jeremy Strong’s Zuckerberg is a cold, calculating and emotionally detached chief executive. He remains unwavering in his belief that his site is the internet’s “public square” but refuses to reckon with how the platforms he owns are poisoning so much of online discourse. Sorkin’s screenplay is at its strongest in the fiery exchanges when Zuckerberg is being prepped by his aides, including Wunmi Mosaku’s Raya, for testimony before the US Congress in early 2021, juxtaposed with the very serious consequences of what can happen when social platforms do nothing to allow rampant misinformation to spread at these “public squares”, and the fallout is damning events such as the attack on the US Capitol on January 6^th.

Despite this razor-sharp dialogue and necessary probe into very recent history that still feels too fresh for many people, Sorkin’s direction lacks the urgent spark this material desperately needs. We have seen that, when directing his own scripts, Sorkin can be loud and furious when he wants to be, particularly with The Trial of the Chicago 7, where the stakes for the history of the United States were enormous and palpable. Fast-forward nearly sixty years, and the stakes are somehow even bigger not only for the US but for the world. Humanity stands at a potential point of no return, and social media companies, and the billionaire tech moguls who own them, have become too powerful to rein in. This is a reckoning which demands to be heard the world over and one can only wonder what might have been if Fincher had wielded the director’s megaphone and delivered that message instead.