In The Social Reckoning, a young Facebook engineer enlists the help of a journalist to blow the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets. Source: Australian Catholics.
The scariest fact emanating from this movie is that 43 per cent of people get their news from Facebook/Meta.
In an age of misinformation, disinformation, fake news and radicalisation, the objective facts and the truth are lost in translation. This is a cautionary tale, although many of us have already been alerted to the way algorithms work to keep feeding us material we might like.
I enjoyed this movie almost as a thriller. The opening got me hooked.
Keen Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Madison), who sees the benefit in a platform that can connect people, becomes disillusioned. She sees a video of a former friend on Facebook and knows that this woman’s constant interactions with the site have radicalised her. As a data scientist, Haugen finds widespread evidence of this. It makes her profoundly uneasy.
Haugen understands that excessive use can be socially harmful. She alerts Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, (White), who exposes the machinations inside the company. Haugen is a whistleblower and this film follows her hot and cold responses to what she knows is right and her eventual appearance before a Senate committee.
Colleagues at the company have to follow the party line in a spooky groupthink sort of way.
Mark Zuckerberg (Strong) has little emotional empathy and is being trained to answer the Senate questions as to what he knew. He says that he is simply supplying a platform or corkboard and is not responsible for what people post.
Watching Zuckerberg interact uncomfortably with staff is an eyeopener. He doesn’t want detail. He just wants the bottom line. He is simply keen on numbers and finding ways of keeping people engaged and online to build profit.
This is a film worth seeing as we watch a world run by the tech bros and what they really get up to behind the scenes.
Review by Ann Rennie, Jesuit Media
The Social Reckoning: Starring Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnusson, Betty Gilpin. Directed by Aaron Sorkin. 112 minutes. Rated M (Mature themes, violence and coarse language)
FULL REVIEW
The Social Reckoning (Australian Catholic)
