As a movie fan, you should remember the movie The Social Network starring Jesse Eisenberg about how Facebook was created. As a movie fan, you need to see The Social Reckoning, which is about Facebook nearly 20 years later, when it fueled hate speech and fake content for profit and got caught. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, this is one of the must-see movies of 2026. I say this because, as a journalist and the fact that this is an investigative journalism movie in the same vein as All the President’s Men or The Post, but it’s a film that helps define the times that we’re living in while shedding light on corporate corruption within social media. I admit, it’s one of my favorite movies of the year, and not just because I’m a huge Aaron Sorkin fan. Even if I wasn’t a fanboy, I would still rave about this movie because of the story that it’s telling and the wonderful performances. I think this movie is just as important as my favorite journalism movie that I mentioned before, All the President’s Men, because we are seeing the corruption within a company that plays such an important role in our lives with social media. There’s a great contrast between watching The Social Network, about a guy wanting to change the world through the internet with social media, and how he is now corrupted while helping to perpetuate hate and propaganda through his company. If there is a True Villain of this story, yes, it is Mark Zuckerberg. There’s been a lot of great stories that will give you the facts of what really happened and how Facebook was taken down by a whistleblower. There’s even a great documentary called Your Attention Please that dives into the same story but also the activism by young adults and parents whose lives were affected in a bad way by social media. This movie tells an inspirational story through great performances and not just interviews.
The story centers on Jeff Horwitz’s investigative reporting on Facebook with The Wall Street Journal and former employee Frances Haugen, who turned whistleblower showed evidence of how Facebook was ignoring fact-checking, mental health liabilities, and energizing hate speech all in the name of anticensorship and more corporate profits. Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison knock it out of the park with their performances as Jeff and Francis. In a lot of ways, this movie plays as a crime thriller with an incredible investigation that takes down bad guys and holds them accountable. I love Mikey Madison as an actress; she’s great. I didn’t think she should have won Best Actress for Anora a couple of years ago, but this is the movie that, for me, she deserves an Oscar for. But if we’re going to talk about the best performances that help drive this movie. Jeremy Strong is cringe-worthy as Mark Zuckerberg and fantastic at the same time. He nails it. If you’ve seen any interview of Mark Zuckerberg today, Jeremy Strong plays him perfectly, and he was clearly the right choice to play an older Zuckerberg, whereas Jesse Eisenberg did a great job playing the younger version. But on the subject of performances, the surprising performance comes from the comedian Bill Burr, who plays Charlie Garrigan, a former advisor to Mark Zuckerberg who essentially is playing his conscience and calling him out for allowing hate and propaganda to prosper in the name of profits. I’m a big fan of Bill Burr; he’s a great comedian, but playing a dramatic role is not something I saw, but he was the perfect choice with his sarcastic quick wit that doesn’t hold back when calling out the bad shit that Facebook is doing. Documentaries are great when telling a story, especially through multiple interviews, but I think sometimes the pop culture standpoint we need a drama with great performances to hit home the message regarding corruption, especially within something that we love and is so important in our society. That’s what Aaron Sorkin has always done through The West Wing, A Few Good Men, Molly’s Game, and even the first Facebook movie. But like anything that he’s ever written or even directed, no scene is wasted; the pacing is perfect, and the dialogue is superb. While I don’t think the movie is absolutely perfect, it delivers in every way by giving us a true legal crime thriller that is suspenseful and keeps you on the edge of your seat.
My biggest criticism of this film, like with any great story, is that there’s so much more that could have been told, and I feel like a limited series might have worked better in some ways. It’s hard to get everything within 2 hours, but the Crux of the story, the important aspects of this story, are told perfectly. Aaron Sorkin gives us everything that we need to know, the important facts. However, I’m a guy who always wants to know more. For example, it’s great to watch All the President’s Men about the Watergate investigation, but Woodward and Bernstein’s book is so much better. I do think this movie doesn’t explain enough about how Jeff Horwitz got on to this story, and we could certainly use a little bit more background on Frances Haugen, but I’ll admit that this is minor nitpicking because I feel like the audience will be like me, where they want to know more. That’s where a really good documentary comes in, and of course Jeff Horwitz’s book, Broken Code, on his investigation into Facebook. However, how Aaron Sorkin tells this story by starting off with a friend of Frances who got radicalized through hate and misinformation on Facebook is a great jumping-off point by asking the big question: how can social media have done this? Plus, showing the preparation that the Facebook team did with Mark Zuckerberg before he went before Congress is brilliant. There’s not much to dislike about this movie.
For me, this is one of the top five journalism movies. It’s a film that we will be talking about decades later, especially with the role of social media in our lives because it’s never going away. These companies are too big to fail. With strong performances and a good script, Aaron Sorkin delivers like he always does. It’s an Oscar-worthy film. The icing on the cake, which brings out the most intense part of the story, is seeing how all of these practices at Facebook helped cause the January 6th insurrection and what Facebook was trying to do by not wanting to shut the platform down in the name of free speech, but also seeing how it was affecting everything, especially with false information coming from the president at the time. It’s a very dramatic moment when these powerful people start to realize that their platform is one of the main causes of an actual insurrection at the American Capitol while challenging the limits of free speech. At the same time, the great juxtaposition is when we finally see Frances give up her anonymity and testify before Congress. Most people already know the story, but seeing the drama behind it through this movie makes it more real and brings out the cause and effect of Facebook’s unethical business practices.
This movie is one of the best things that Aaron Sorkin has ever written, and whereas The Social Network gives us this great jumping-off point of hope and creating something that will change the world, this movie shows the corruption of that idea. Absolutely, you should go see this movie. It’s worth the price of a movie ticket. And if documentaries or news reports don’t scare you about the dangers of social media and the lack of checks and balances, this movie will, especially when you find out at the end that Facebook didn’t really change; all they did was get caught, and they’re so big and powerful that not even billions of dollars in settlements can truly bring them down. Film fans and critics have always asked the question: can movies change the world… can a good drama inspire humanity? Yes, they can, and the Social Reckoning is the perfect example. Last thing, for the journalist in me, this movie is definitely Nerd Approved!
