M, 112 minutes
3 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
Around halfway into this respectable and solid new drama about social media giant Meta, the juggernaut we still call Facebook, the acronym MSI suddenly pops into the conversation. MSI was a reductive shorthand Facebook staffers used as they adopted new tactics to reverse a growing decline in the use of their platform in 2019.
It wasn’t enough for Facebook to have nearly three billion users on its books in that year. The company determined that what was needed was some meaningful social interaction.
Definitions of meaningful social interaction differ. How meaningful is social interaction using the likes, comments and shares that so many of use daily? A sharp satirical comedy could take Facebook’s version of MSI to task, but the writer-director of The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin, explores a challenging period in FB corporate history here.
Based on true characters and events, it takes place as a member of FB’s Civic Integrity team, young data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), begins to feel that something is wrong. In-company research had been showing that its algorithms were making a significant difference to the number of users adopting radical political positions. She had just seen on social media a devastating video of a former friend streaming her encounter with police.
It unfolds in the film’s disturbing opening scenes, as a young blonde woman is being questionned by two Black American police over an issue with her vehicle. The encounter quickly spirals out of control as the driver’s language turns into racist diatribe. Frances cannot recognise her former friend, now transformed and stigmatised by her extremist social media activity.
As a member of Facebook’s civic integrity team blows the whistle
As a spirited yet downhearted sex worker in Anora, a recent best film at the Oscars, Madison stole the show. Her character here is not about contradictions, but, as she becomes a person of courage and conviction, about growth. Despite the isolation among co-workers of similar age, she resists the pressure to conform and rejects the company line, ditching the ridiculous company mantras about the virtue of their mission.
At around the same time, The Wall Street Journal has begun investigating Facebook. Of course, dedicated young investigative print journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) represents the legacy media. The print media in decline due to social media, the platforms to whom it is estimated around 40 percent of adults turn for their news. It’s not that FB is taking away our jobs in reporting the news, Jeff insists, it’s just that social media is so bad at it.
After Madison exposed the lack of integrity at her workplace to The Wall Street Journal, who subsequently published their famous Facebook Files, she underwent Congressional scrutiny and become an official whistleblower.
As the narrative timeline shuttles back and forth between the years 2019 to 2021, there are scenes of Mark Zuckerberg, who is played on this occasion by a stern, rigidified Jeremy Strong (Succession). To prepare for his appearance before the American Senate, the FB CEO is coached by his team to appear less like an automaton and more like a human being. Did these scenes need to look so contrived?
Where are the bigger, tougher questions for the tech-bro titans?
Aside from this, it is interesting to hear Zuckerberg defend his position on free speech on the platform. Facebook was not a referee, it was the public square. That he was a free-speech absolutist. As an esteemed writer of political screenplays like The West Wing television series, films The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Steve Jobs, Sorkin is well suited to tackle the ‘outsized and unprecedent’ role of Facebook for a second time, but why doesn’t he ask bigger, tougher questions about where the tech-bro titans are taking us now?
Sixteen years ago, when The Social Network, with David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven) directing Sorkin’s screenplay, came out. It seemed ahead of the game, even rather daring. It was kinder and more indulgent towards its Mark Zuckerberg character, then played by Jesse Eisenberg, an actor who it is almost impossible not to like.
Facebook and other social media had less to answer for in 2010 than now. Stoking outrage and radicalising new recruits, as well as damage to teenage mental health, especially among young girls, to name a few. Now is the time to look at social media through the prism of these and other current scenarios, through its likely influence into the future.
Published on 9 October 2026 in the Canberra Times, elsewhere in Australian Community Media, and also on Rotten Tomatoes