"The Social Reckoning": Sorkin Explains Facebook to Us, Part Two

Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Reckoning" opened in US cinemas on Friday. Billed as a companion piece to 2010's "The Social Network", it follows Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who went public with internal documents about the platform's effects in 2021. Mikey Madison plays Haugen, Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg. Reviews range from mixed to warm, and the debate about Strong's Zuckerberg is livelier than the one about the algorithm.

Hollywood has thus nearly completed a remarkable trilogy. Part one: a student builds a platform. Part two: an employee explains what the platform did. In between, three billion people kept writing the script for free, with holiday photos, conspiracy theories and birthday wishes from people they last saw in primary school.

A film about the power of algorithms whose box office depends on whether the algorithm likes the trailer. It does not get more meta than that.

That is not a dig at Sorkin, it is the state of the industry: criticism of platforms is sold through platforms, and outrage about engagement machines generates engagement. Anyone looking for showtimes will probably find them first in a feed that knows exactly how much they enjoy films about feeds. Reports so far give no German release date.