Aaron Sorkin's 'The Social Reckoning' Portrays Zuckerberg in Harsher Light Than Ever

Sixteen years after the blockbuster "The Social Network," Aaron Sorkin continues his portrait of Mark Zuckerberg. Hollywood history may not hold another film that so thoroughly dismantles a media mogul.

From Eisenberg to Strong: A Shift in Tone

Jesse Eisenberg, best known for playing the shy, nerdy outsider, was the ideal casting for Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network"—the brilliant student who wrote a virtual contact program to compensate for his social ineptitude. The real Zuckerberg reportedly found Eisenberg's portrayal "hurtful."

Now, Sorkin—creator of "The West Wing"—returns with "The Social Reckoning," a sequel or companion piece. Facebook has become a global corporation, and Zuckerberg is once again a central figure. This time, he is played by Jeremy Strong.

Strong is not a top-tier star, but those who have seen him perform do not forget him: he played the Kennedy assassin in "Parkland," the CEO's son in "Succession," and—most notably—the Mephistophelian mentor to young Donald Trump in "The Apprentice," teaching him all the dirty tricks.

Strong is a pure method actor, an obsessive who pushes to the limits of his roles. During the filming of "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (also a Sorkin film), he demanded his director spray him with real tear gas in a protest scene. Strong's Zuckerberg is cold, unapproachable, calculating to the point of inhumanity. If Eisenberg was hurtful, Strong is devastating.

A Film Unlike Any Other

One would be hard-pressed to find another film in Hollywood history that so thoroughly demolishes a media mogul—especially a living one, and certainly not under his real name. The newspaper baron in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" was an orphan boy in comparison. The new supervillains of American cinema are not evil communists or nasty jihadists, but the chiefs of Big Tech.

Sorkin's Narrative Device

A line from the film's trailers, which ran on Facebook and Instagram, declares: "Mark Zuckerberg will love 'The Social Reckoning.'" Given the devastating image the film paints of Zuckerberg, this is almost certainly false. The trailer immediately performs a dialectical backflip: "Facebook doesn't check most ads for accuracy. Why should we?"

This brings us to the film's central theme: Facebook's refusal to verify the truthfulness of the content it spreads. Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz wants to understand how the platform's algorithms work. When the company treats this as a state secret, he seeks a willing insider. He finds one: a computer scientist named Frances Haugen, who increasingly feels a contradiction between the company's moral claims and its daily actions.

At its core, "The Social Reckoning" is a remake of the Watergate film "All the President's Men": a fearless reporter uncovers dark power machinations, with Mark Zuckerberg in place of Richard Nixon—the Big Tech magnate who flouts community rules, rather than the president who believes he is above the law.

Exposing criminals who commit burglaries for political gain is one thing; tracking an invisible algorithm and proving it creates psychological dependencies and promotes extremist views is quite another.

Sorkin solves this problem by distributing the task across three shoulders: the clueless reporter (who needs everything explained), the informant (who does not want to be a whistleblower but only wants to improve the system), and the spider at the center. We meet Mark Zuckerberg in a tutoring session where a coach tries to teach him how to appear sympathetic during an upcoming Senate hearing—and nearly despairs at instilling even a hint of empathy in the boss, who cares only about numbers and statistics.

This is Strong's Zuckerberg: sitting as if he has swallowed a stick, demanding only facts from his subordinates, and shouting "I said 'No'!" when someone dares to contradict him. Strong does not play his character as a caricature, but as a kind of autistic demon—one who is at least aware of what people think of him.

Real Names, Real Stakes

Sorkin is a first-class screenwriter and a good director of actors. He is not David Fincher, and Fincher's "The Social Network" remains an unmatched masterpiece and the starting shot for the genre of the new media age. "The Social Reckoning" lacks that directorial brilliance, but it possesses a crystal-clear view of the immense societal significance of its subject matter.

Opposite the specter of Zuckerberg stand two grounded figures: Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz. Haugen—played by Mikey Madison, the Oscar winner from "Anora"—is aware of the consequences of her actions and fears them (rightly, as it turns out). Horwitz—played by Jeremy Allen White, the young Bruce Springsteen in "Deliver Me from Nowhere"—is not a crusading reporter, but skeptical, tenacious, and responsible.

Like Zuckerberg, Haugen and Horwitz appear under their real names in the film. Without Haugen's revelations and Horwitz's series of articles, there would have been neither "The Social Reckoning" nor the lawsuits from parents over the endangerment of their children's mental health, nor the $17 billion Meta paid to settle such allegations out of court. "Reckoning" means both accountability and calculation.

"I know there are easier enemies," Horwitz says to a colleague in the film. The reply: "The Mafia would be an easier enemy." Production company Sony—itself a billion-dollar conglomerate—deployed a small army of lawyers to Sorkin's script to remove any potential grounds for a lawsuit from Meta. In the end, reportedly only the word "bitch" was cut. Furthermore, the name Trump is never mentioned once in the entire film, even though "The Social Reckoning" culminates in the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters as its dramatic climax.

The Tech Billionaire as Villain

It is worth remembering that Horwitz's Facebook series appeared in 2021 in the Wall Street Journal—the paper Rupert Murdoch had bought a few years earlier. Murdoch was in a bitter dispute with Zuckerberg in 2021 because Facebook refused to pay for using content from Murdoch's newspapers. It is also worth remembering that Elon Musk personally called Rupert Murdoch to complain about a Journal article regarding his drug use. And one should not forget that Zuckerberg's Big Tech peer Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post—the paper that once uncovered the Watergate scandal and later banished unfavorable positions from its opinion pages.

The tech titans have long since extended their influence into "old" media. Films are also an "old" medium. And this medium has now begun to fight back, as far as it still can. This was not always the case. Two years after his death, "Jobs" (2013) portrayed the Apple co-founder as a complex genius.

Soon, however, the image shifted. In "Jurassic World," a tech-founder type ends up as dinosaur food. In "Venom," a billionaire experiments with eternal life through symbiosis with aliens. In "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery," Daniel Craig exposes a Musk-like tycoon as a murderer. And in the satire "Mountainhead," four filthy-rich characters (including Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman) supposedly meet for a relaxing weekend but only want to swindle each other. The tech billionaire as a villain type was established.

Now it is no longer about types, but about real people. "Ink," Danny Boyle's new film, tells the story of the Murdoch empire's beginnings. "Artificial" depicts the revolt at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Neither Altman nor Musk—both named in the film—come off well. "Artificial" was originally to be distributed by Amazon MGM. But Amazon withdrew, stating the film "would be better served if released by another studio." This decision came a few months after Amazon entered a comprehensive partnership with OpenAI. "Artificial" will now be released by the small independent studio Neon. Meta initially refused to show a trailer for Alex Gibney's four-hour, unflattering "Musk" documentary, only changing course after protests.

The question is how long films like "The Social Reckoning" will continue to exist. Almost all classic Hollywood studios are owned by large corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Sony, or Netflix. The acquisition of Warner by Paramount is made possible by billions from Oracle owner Larry Ellison. Ellison is on a first-name basis with Donald Trump. Perhaps we will see more films like "Melania"—the reverent, adoring portrait of the First Lady. Amazon paid $40 million for that. "The Social Reckoning" cost only $10 million more.