OFF THE RAILS

This Bonkers Jan. 6 Scene Ruins Aaron Sorkin’s Smug Sequel

“The Social Reckoning” really isn’t that bad—until this happens.

It’s a familiar scenario: You’re watching a movie, and everything is going well. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, comes a moment that leaves such a rotten taste in your mouth that it ruins the entire experience.

Welcome to The Social Reckoning.

Let’s take a step back: Aaron Sorkin’s latest film is a sequel to the 2010 masterpiece The Social Network. Sorkin won an Oscar for writing the original, with David Fincher directing. But Fincher has no involvement in the sequel. This one is all Sorkin.

[WARNING: Spoilers ahead]

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Sorkin’s film explores how Facebook became a force for evil rather than good, and the effort to expose that, led by Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Anora’s Mikey Madison) and investigative journalist Jeff Horowitz (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White). The movie opens with what seems like a seemingly disconnected scene: An intoxicated white lady (Portia Doubleday) goes on a racist tirade against some police officers.

We eventually learn that this woman was an old friend of Frances who used to be politically left, before Facebook radicalized her into joining right-wing extremist groups. Frances states in the film that 64 percent of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook were driven there by Facebook’s algorithm rather than looking for them themselves. That’s a staggering and damning statistic, and The Social Reckoning gets a lot of mileage out of it.

For most of its 112-minute runtime, The Social Reckoning works. Sorkin has a strong sense of pacing, and his wordy, dialogue-heavy style suits a procedural story like this one. Madison makes a compelling lead, and even if the information on display doesn’t feel particularly new or shocking to anyone who spends a lot of time on the internet, it’s presented in an intriguing procedural fashion.

Then Sorkin has to bring in Jan. 6.

Yes, that January 6: the day in 2021 when Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the supposedly “stolen” election. On a logical level, using the events of that day makes sense. This is a film about how Facebook encouraged a rise in extremist, rage-baiting behavior, and what symbolizes that better than that miserable day in American history?

But Sorkin’s execution is embarrassing at best, and unbearably smug at worst.

The scene serves as the film’s climax towards the end of the third act. Sorkin cuts between the rioters marching on the Capitol and a Facebook situation room, where the company’s leadership is watching the news unfold while monitoring public posts from Trump. We don’t actually see any of the messages from him, just random throwaway lines like, “He’s posting again!”

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Various executives urge Mark Zuckerberg (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) to take the posts down. The self-identified “free speech absolutist,” who we learn has likely been censoring negative comments on his own Facebook posts, ignores them.

Sorkin cuts back to images of the riots. Feet stomping, furious yelling, cops being trampled, screams and cries of panic. The implication is that Zuckerberg is responsible for the riots, and until he does something, chaos will continue to reign.

But that’s hardly the most groanworthy part of the sequence.

Guess who’s in the crowd at the Capitol? None other than the radicalized woman from the opening scene. Here, The Social Reckoning suggests, or, more accurately, bluntly hits you over the hammer with, the idea that this woman would never have stormed the Capitol if Facebook hadn’t pushed her to do so.

The woman pauses for a moment, as if she realizes what she’s doing is out of character and completely irresponsible—but then rage flashes in her eyes, and she continues to try to overthrow democracy.

Of course, none of this should be that surprising given that all the way back in 2024, Sorkin said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “I blame Facebook for January 6.”

It’s not unreasonable to say that Facebook played a role, and the Facebook Files—published by The Wall Street Journal and forming the basis of the film—do a brilliant job highlighting how the platform deliberately pushed people towards dark corners of extremist behavior to keep them engaged on the website.

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But the film laughably suggests here that Facebook was more responsible for Jan. 6 than Donald Trump, whose name Sorkin chose to leave out of the script because he worried it would be a “distraction.” It’s as if Sorkin thinks the moment Zuckerberg decides to take Trump’s posts down, the furious insurrectionists would magically stop what they’re doing, hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”

The climactic scene is so absurd it almost makes the viewer sympathize with Mark Zuckerberg—a character Jeremy Strong plays without a shred of humanity, deliberately to avoid such feelings.

One impressive thing about this painfully smug sequence: It will inevitably infuriate the entire political spectrum, from far-left to far-right. If that’s what Sorkin was going for, then congratulations! You nailed it.

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Barry LevittFreelance Writer

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