When you watch a movie like The Social Reckoning, you feel the need to defend your actions. Here is my story. The only reason I joined Facebook was because I saw it as a tool to promote my now-defunct history consulting business. As an aside, if you are reading this and are looking for historical insight into a project, I am available. The key word there is business, and that is what the social media platform is. I continued using it not really for its supposed purpose, which is to build community, but to remember friends’ birthdays and to interact with those I see infrequently. It also has some fun Catholic content, which is important to me. Still, I would not blame anyone for deleting their accounts after seeing this movie or reading this review.

The business behind Facebook takes center stage in The Social Reckoning when a disturbing video post is viewed by Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), an engineer and data scientist who works for the company. In it, an old friend of hers is seen being interviewed by two police officers trying to help her while her car is broken down on the side of a busy road. What concerns Frances is that her formerly progressive friend is shouting racial slurs at these officers, who are people of color. In looking into the matter, Frances wants to know about the role Facebook played in her friend’s radicalization, a question that nobody at the company seems interested in answering despite her work on its Civic Integrity team. At the same time, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, comes to the paper’s San Francisco bureau to begin looking into Facebook’s activities. What follows is an effort to expose what the social media company knew about the consequences of its own products. Jeff recognizes that there is a problem, but he lacks the technical know-how to say anything of substance. He thus begins recruiting sources, which proves successful despite the company’s awareness of his inquiries. His investigation brings him to Frances, who comes to believe that the company’s public promises about connecting people are increasingly at odds with its internal research and business priorities. Frances confronts the difficult problem of how the platform distributes information to billions of people. Its systems reward material that attracts attention and encourages users to keep scrolling, but the content that generates engagement can also deepen political hostility, circulate misinformation, and expose vulnerable people to harmful material. The film portrays the conflict between employees trying to reduce those harms and a corporate structure reluctant to make changes that might diminish growth. Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), the company’s immensely powerful founder, represents an institution whose decisions affect people far beyond its offices. Indeed, throughout much of the film, there are scenes of him being coached on how to address the United States Congress and answer difficult questions about his company’s enormous reach and the role it has played in potentially misleading the public. For Zuckerberg, Facebook’s role is that of a defender of free speech. This also means that it becomes a landing zone for hate speech, which, as the film portrays it, is not a priority to stop if doing so means a decline in use of the product. As Frances learns more about the company’s internal findings, she becomes convinced that its leadership understands significant risks while offering the public a more reassuring account. Those risks include the effects of Instagram on some young users’ mental health and the role of Facebook’s algorithms in amplifying anger and division. The drama also situates these concerns in the political upheaval surrounding the 2020 United States presidential election and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Frances faces a personal and professional dilemma: she can continue working within the organization and hope to change it, or she can disclose confidential information and risk the consequences of challenging one of the world’s most influential corporations. She begins communicating more with Jeff despite her earlier reservations, the risk to her career, and the possibility of betraying a company she claims to respect. Her insights prove invaluable in bridging the gap between Facebook’s internal knowledge and its public statements. Their collaboration becomes the center of the film as the two work to turn a vast body of technical documents into evidence that ordinary readers can understand. Jeff must assess the material, verify its significance, and prepare reporting that can withstand scrutiny, while Frances must decide how much of her identity and career she is willing to place at risk. Eventually, she decides to quit her job and become a whistleblower, obtaining as much information as she can before she is locked out of the system. Their efforts lead to the publication of the newspaper’s Facebook Files investigation, which describes internal research and discussions about the company’s practices. The disclosures challenge Facebook’s account of its efforts to protect users and bring renewed attention to the incentives built into social media platforms. The story culminates in Frances’ decision to identify herself publicly as the source of the documents, including through a television interview and testimony before Congress. Her decision transforms a confidential exchange between an employee and a journalist into a national debate about accountability, corporate power, and the responsibility of technology companies toward their users.

The Social Reckoning presents the episode as a struggle in which an individual whistleblower and a newspaper reporter attempt to hold an enormous company to account. Its central question is whether a business built around bringing people together can acknowledge and meaningfully address the ways its products may also drive them apart. The final assessment is not a good one. Despite making people aware of Facebook’s abuses, there is a note before the end credits asserting that the company currently has no guardrails governing what people post on its platform. Though I will go into the spiritual consequences of this in the next paragraph, here I want to focus on how Zuckerberg is portrayed. It is not what this Catholic would call ideal. He is definitely the villain of the story, and the depiction is not too dissimilar to his portrayal in The Social Network (2010). In The Social Reckoning, Zuckerberg is less concerned about people liking him because the company is already established and wildly successful. Where the portrayals are similar is in the same smarmy, know-it-all attitude he displays toward those with whom he interacts. As a practicing Catholic, I try to be as charitable as possible, but the movie makes clear that it sees him as placing profits over integrity. If I may be somewhat less critical, one needs to take such depictions with a grain of proverbial salt. Can I say definitively that Zuckerberg is the villain the film makes him out to be? Only God knows the answer to that question. What cannot be ignored are the harms associated with decisions made under his leadership, and knowingly disregarding the welfare of others is never Christian behavior.

What would be more identifiably Christian behavior in The Social Reckoning is Frances’ actions. Specifically, it is when she informs The Wall Street Journal of her willingness to go public with her identity rather than remain an anonymous source. She is told of the possible consequences and tells them that she wants to make her name known in order to add credibility to the information coming out about Facebook. Her willingness to accept public scrutiny for the sake of truth calls to mind, in a limited way, Jesus submitting Himself to the public humiliation of His Passion. Both involve speaking truth in the face of powerful opposition, although Christ’s redemptive sacrifice is, of course, unique. In this way, Frances is to be admired because she is willing to risk so much to do what is right. This is in stark contrast to Zuckerberg and Facebook as a whole, as portrayed in the film. No matter your feelings about the platform’s founder, the company knew about the negative aspects of its relentless drive for growth and chose to prioritize decisions that would continue that upward trajectory. This is not intended to be a Catholic diatribe against economic success. The Church does not teach that wealth is evil in itself. It is what a wealthy person does with those riches that matters. And when the thing making you a fantastic amount of money is enabling hate speech and deepening division, you have a moral duty to address those harms if you have the power to do so. Catholicism understands love as willing the good of others, not just yourself. As such, what is loving about amplifying the voices of people who preach ideologies that are anything but? Or about allowing a platform to contribute to the hostility that culminated in the violence we saw at the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

The riots and attempted disruption of the peaceful transfer of presidential power by the January 6 rioters feature heavily in the climactic moments of The Social Reckoning. In many respects, it is a fitting event given the title because the film presents it as an extreme consequence of Facebook’s willingness to amplify harmful material. That is a far cry from the site’s supposed goals and from anything Christian in nature. As such, I think this is an important film to watch.