Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning has its fair share of cinematic flair, but many details in the story hew closely to real life. The movie tells the story of how Frances Haugen, a Facebook civic integrity product manager, came to leak a large trove of internal documents to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, in what would later become a 2021 series called “The Facebook Files.” In both real life and in the film, Haugen’s leaks lead her to testify as a congressional whistleblower. The final frames of the movie describe the impact she had even after that closing scene, speaking before governments around the world and bolstering lawsuits against Meta nationwide with the internal communications she disclosed.
The film’s Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, says that she really believes in Facebook, echoing a message the real Haugen left for her colleagues just before she signed off for her last day in May 2021. “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote on the company’s internal message board, according to The Journal. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”
Sorkin, both directing and screenwriting the semi-follow up to 2010’s The Social Network, which he only wrote, took some liberties with the dialogue and the chronology of the movie. The most obvious is that he condensed the timeline and shifted major events forward by several months. Some key moments in the film — Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) preparing for a congressional hearing about misinformation and extremism and Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) getting ready to publish the first Facebook Files report — occur on the same day, which happens to be January 6th, 2021, amid the insurrection at the US Capitol. In reality, Zuckerberg testified in the House alongside other tech CEOs in March 2021, and the first installment of the Facebook Files wasn’t published until that September.
”I love Facebook. I want to save it”
But the movie pulls directly from Horwitz’ investigation and the documents that Haugen collected, which showed how the company applied its content moderation policies in inconsistent ways, drove users toward hate groups, and had meager responses to apparent human trafficking on the platform. Meta declined to provide a comment on the movie, but in past statements, the company has referred to the documents collected by Haugen and their recounting in the Facebook Files as cherry-picked to serve a specific narrative. Zuckerberg called the reporting Facebook Files “a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company” during a 2021 earnings call after the initial reports were released, and said that when faced with “impossible tradeoffs … these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing different difficult social values.” Here’s what you should know about the real life events underpinning the film.
Losing a friend to the misinformation rabbit hole inspired Haugen
The Social Reckoning opens with a young blonde woman standing next to her overheating car on the side of a highway. When cops pull up to ask if she’s okay and smell alcohol on her breath, the exchange quickly grows tense. The woman appears unnerved by the officer, a person of color, and whips out her phone to record him; soon, she’s threatening violence and is arrested. Then, we see Madison’s Haugen in her apartment watching the video the woman posted to her Facebook page, “Voice of Reason,” with the caption “Watch me own DEI cops.” Haugen reveals later that the woman was a friend she met in spin class, radicalized by conspiracy theories on Facebook after the progressive candidate she campaigned for lost.
The scene and details about the friend appear to be fictionalized, but are based on a true part of Haugen’s story. Haugen told The Journal that she took the role on Facebook’s civic integrity team after seeing a family friend radicalized online. “It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to it,” she said.
Facebook’s algorithm recommended extremist groups
In the movie, one of the first major revelations Haugen shares with White’s Horwitz is that 64 percent of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook were sent there by its algorithm. That statistic — in the movie and real life — became the basis of a May 2020 article in The Journal. In the real article, Horwitz and co-author Deepa Seetharaman wrote that a 2016 internal Facebook presentation found “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.” It added, “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.” At the time of the 2020 article’s publication, a Facebook spokesperson told The Journal it had since strengthened protections and “are not the same company today.”
A shift in Facebook’s algorithm promoted rage
As they hunt through pages of documents in the movie, Haugen and Horwitz keep trying to figure out why Facebook tuned its recommendation algorithm to reward “Meaningful Social Interactions” (MSI), rather than likes, in 2018. Haugen senses favoring MSI could be driving users like her friend toward radicalization, but she and Horwitz initially aren’t sure how — especially since Facebook publicly said the shift was expected to undercut engagement. They come to understand that the new ranking system weighted emoji reactions and reshares much more highly than likes; Zuckerberg and other executives knew this change would promote rage-sharing.
That’s a fairly accurate translation of what we know about MSI. Zuckerberg promoted the shift as a way to correct for a trend of “public content” from brands and media “crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.” Though he anticipated the change would be good for users, he said it would actually hurt Facebook’s engagement. But, he said, “if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”
”Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares”
In an installment of The Journal’s “Facebook Files” series in 2021, however, Horwitz and co-author Keach Hagey found that Facebook employees had warned that prioritizing MSI was promoting angrier engagement. Documents obtained by The Journal showed that leading up to the change, Facebook had been concerned about declining engagement from users through actions like resharing or commenting. To combat this, the documents showed, Facebook tried to encourage more original posts and resharing. While Facebook found some positive user benefits of the change, researchers found, “Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares.” Zuckerberg, in the movie and apparently real life, resisted some mitigation proposals that would damage engagement.
Meta has downplayed the significance of MSI. In a statement to The Journal at the time, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said, “Is a ranking change the source of the world’s divisions? No.”
Instagram made teen girls feel worse about their bodies
In the movie, Haugen’s colleague shares a thumb drive with documents including a study about how Instagram harms teen girls’ body image. She tells Haugen to get the word out before the company starts marketing Instagram Kids. It’s not clear if this colleague actually existed, but the information she shares appears to be based on an internal study that found 32 percent of teen girls surveyed who said they felt bad about their bodies felt worse after using Instagram. Instagram had indeed planned to launch a service specifically for kids under 13, but announced shortly amid the uproar from the “Facebook Files” release that it was pausing the project to work through concerns.
An early Facebook investor encouraged Zuckerberg to change
As Strong’s Zuckerberg preps for the 2021 congressional hearing in the film, sitting on a stage behind a desk and rehearsing answers with his team, a venture capitalist named Charlie emerges from the shadows. Charlie, played by comedian Bill Burr, gives Zuckerberg feedback and urges him to moderate political ads. Movie-Zuckerberg says he’s upset with Charlie after he wrote a scathing op-ed, and reminds him he 100x’d his investment, which would have been worth over $1 billion if he’d held his position.
Charlie is inspired by real-life Facebook investor-turned-critic Roger McNamee, an executive producer of the film. McNamee published an op-ed in The Guardian in 2017 charging that Facebook and Google “threaten public health – and democracy,” and in 2019 published the book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Sorkin told Vanity Fair that although McNamee was game to be depicted in the movie, “it was made clear” that “there might be a problem with Facebook” in depicting the conversation between the VC character and Zuckerberg in the movie. So the character became a fictionalized version inspired by McNamee, instead.
Facebook’s civic integrity team was “absorbed”
In the film, Haugen seems dejected when she realizes that the civic integrity team she works on — which worked on worldwide election-related risks including misinformation — will likely be dissolved, and she’ll be reassigned. A Facebook executive assures the team that even if that were to happen, the work would be “absorbed” into other teams, and it would only be beneficial to their work.
“I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous”
This reflects how the company communicated the change in structure following the 2020 US election. In her “60 Minutes” interview in 2021, Haugen said, “when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’” (That’s actually when Haugen first responded to Horwitz’ initial outreach on LinkedIn.) Meta executive Guy Rosen responded at the time that the team was not disbanded, but rather “integrated” into “a larger Central Integrity team so that the incredible work pioneered for elections could be applied even further, for example across health related issues. Their work continues to this day.”
Zuckerberg’s office was bulletproofed
Haugen’s film character mentions that Zuckerberg has bullet-proof features in his office, which appears to be based in reality. A 2019 report from Business Insider found that a “glass-walled conference room” he would sometimes work from had “bullet-resistant windows and a panic button.”
It took time for Haugen and Horwitz to build a strong source-reporter relationship
The movie depicts a push-and-pull relationship between Haugen and Horwitz, as the journalist tries to get Haugen to share more information without crossing a delicate ethical line of soliciting her to steal confidential documents. As Haugen decides whether or not to go the extra mile, she also becomes frustrated with Horwitz for not making more progress on his own.
The two meet regularly on a hiking path, where Horwitz eventually gives Haugen a burner phone to communicate with him and on which she later takes pictures of internal documents. At one point, Horwitz even travels to Puerto Rico to collect more information from Haugen, after she relocated there during the pandemic.
These details all seem to mostly follow the true course of their source building relationship. Haugen told The New York Times in 2021 that she had “auditioned” Horwitz for some time, and decided to give him the scoop because she found him to be “less sensationalistic than other choices I could have made.” Horwitz acknowledged in an on-stage interview with Haugen in 2022 that “things got tense between us” at times, in part because Haugen had concerns about The Journal’s institutional approach, and in part over some messiness about when certain information was released by other publications or agencies Haugen worked with.
Haugen really did relocate to Puerto Rico during the pandemic, and Horwitz also visited her to collect information, though the timeline of those travels is different than in the movie. Haugen invited him to Puerto Rico once she realized Facebook’s policies prevented her from working from a US territory, prompting a deadline to quit or move. She chose to quit, meaning the pair had one last period of time they could access internal documents at Facebook. Speaking to Horwitz on stage in 2022, Haugen said she was “so grateful that you put in a huge amount of effort to just be there and make sure that we asked as many questions as we could so history got to have some kind of record for it.”
