Media365
4 min readOct 9, 2026 03:30 PM IST
The Social Reckoning movie review: Explaining the theory on which Facebook’s News Feed is based, Mark Zuckerberg once said: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”
What he didn’t say was that Facebook algorithm could well determine what seems closer – your front yard or Africa.
‘We’re way past making friends,’ as The Social Reckoning’s tagline says. Way past, that is, The Social Network, whose Zuckerberg was about to found Facebook, and who was this mesmeric awkward, brash, nervous genius who may not have got many likes, but whom you could not scroll past.
Sixteen years later, Zuckerberg is both the MAGA and Meta version of that boy prince. Jeremy Strong plays him as a cold, robotic, purely-numbers-driven billionaire, with a bulletproof couch to hide behind, who doesn’t need anyone’s approval any more. Which is a world removed from Jesse Eisenberg’s curly-haired, twitchy, newly rich 20-year-old who, when The Social Network ended, was repeatedly refreshing his computer screen for a response on a friend request (Eisenberg refused to reprise the role for the new film).
The Social Reckoning movie trailer:
However, the thing is, The Social Reckoning is not about Zuckerberg as such, and you come out knowing little new about a man who has proved even more of a chameleon than suspected. This film is more about The Wall Street Journal story that caused a rip in the veil cloaking a company whose professed credo is “full transparency inside”, but “nothing should leak outside”.
The two people who come together to deal the blow are The Journal’s reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). With little to sketch their characters apart from the limited framing of their professions, White and Madison do well to keep their digging into Facebook’s algorithm and design interesting and briskly moving.
Aaron Sorkin, the writer-director of The Social Reckoning, also does a good job in casting these honest, earnest-looking actors. Even the riffs between them, the slight banter and humour, do not seem forced.
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However, Sorkin, regarded better for his writing (including The Social Network) than directing (The Trial of the Chicago 7), cannot help giving them his usual smart-alecky moments, where they dwell on everything from Frank Capra to Spartacus.
Still, their intentions are clear, noble as they are – Haugen repeatedly emphasises how she loves Facebook, and wants only to help rather than destroy it. The Social Reckoning would have gained a great degree by focusing more on Zuckerberg’s.
The Facebook founder’s appearance is largely limited to his team prepping him for a Senate hearing. Strong conveys the barely-contained fury of a man who continues to insist that all he has done is “democratise” the global “public square”, and his incomprehension that he should be held responsible for what people do once there. In the middle, we get flashes of another Zuckerberg in action, taking hard, cold calls at board meetings – ignoring warnings – based solely on what will earn him more. That could be turning a blind eye to evidence, as per just one data point, that 64% of people on extremist groups online had been directed there by Facebook.
How does the first Zuckerberg square with the second? The Social Reckoning offers few answers.
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Perhaps we should not look for any. Despite Haugen, despite Horwitz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Facebook Files’ series, despite the January 6 Capitol riots – a pivotal moment in the film – Zuckerberg now has a seat at the White House table, at the head of which sits a President whom the film refuses to name.
We are still waiting for a reckoning.
The Social Reckoning movie cast: Jeremy Strong, Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Betty Gilpin
The Social Reckoning movie director: Aaron Sorkin
The Social Reckoning movie rating: 3.5 stars
