In May 2020, Wall Street Journal reporters Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman published a major story about Facebook. They quoted internal research, documents, and messages in which employees argued that Facebook’s algorithms “exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness” and that, “if left unchecked,” it could feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” Another employee had found that “64 percent of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.” Presented with this information, and much more, Facebook’s leadership shrugged it off and moved to shut down further research.

In Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, we hear about this 64 percent a lot, from Mikey Madison’s Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White’s Horwitz. In the film’s version of 2020, its discovery and reporting is surprising and revelatory — shocking evidence that inspired a loyal employee to leak and reporter to keep following the story, used to set up a nearly unbroken series expository arguments, rendered in high Sorkinese, about whether Facebook is a neutral platform or source of information responsible for fact-checking politicians claims, the “ref” or, as in-movie Zuckerberg puts it, “the public square.”

In reality, the Journal’s scoop, which would eventually be followed by many more, was a very different sort of story. It was a feat of reporting, and a rare leak from a secretive company, but also, most of all, a valuable, documented, internal confirmation of what anyone with a Facebook feed — or who had been keeping up with American politics — had known  since at least 2015. It published into an environment in which most commentary and coverage about the scandal-plagued company assumed as much, and where, years earlier, the shape and incentives of Mark Zuckerberg’s advertising platform had been blamed — and credited by his campaign! — for the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not this was true, and whatever the company had said about connecting the world, it had long been clear that Facebook’s primary goal was to keep people engaged with its product, even if that meant turning them against each other. If you spent any time in social media news feeds in the late 2010s, nothing else could have possibly been true, unless the products had somehow designed themselves. This makes watching Sorkin’s second movie about Facebook, a period piece set in the somehow ancient recent past (2019-2021), strangely disorienting, and not just for its strangely optimistic political mood.

By the time the rest of Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting came out, the controversial mechanism behind that 64 percent figure — captured in an internal presentation given in 2016, a full decade before the film — was well on its way to eating the entire company. In its legacy products, including Facebook’s News Feed, algorithmic recommendations had become more central over time, not just for pages but for the next post users would see, deprioritizing social connections in........

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