The Social Reckoning: How Jeremy Strong’s Performance Stepped All Over Aaron Sorkin’s Message

October 2026

 

I bet Kara Swisher couldn’t wait to see The Social Reckoning...

 

Because... once-upon-a-time ...

Swisher was a tech reporter....

Albeit...a mere 30 years ago...

 

But recently she has made a podcast career...

Out of seething vitriol toward Mark Zuckerberg...

Whom she hates only slightly less than Elon Musk...

And, of course, The Donald...

 

And I’m sure she thought...

 

Aaron Sorkin...

Who writes screenplays that are comfort food for the Left...

(See The West Wing, Newsroom, and Succession)

 

Would be just the guy to deliver a scathing takedown of her favorite bête noire...

The CEO of Meta...

A man she has called “a small little creature with a shriveled soul”...

And one of the “most dangerous figures in tech history”...

 

And Sorkin hired Jeremy Strong ...

The go-to actor for characters you want the audience to hate...

To play Zuckerberg...

 

So The Social Reckoning was an opportunity...

For Sorkin to undo the damage done by The Social Network...

For which he wrote the screenplay...

 

And allow him to bury once and for all the ever so slightly sympathetic image..

Of the socially awkward... if mercenary...

Tech bro found in that film...

 

Who created Facebook to meet girls...

And not to destroy the world...

 

But this time Sorkin...

Would be in charge as the director...

 

But, frankly, he is not that good at it...

The structure of the film is disjointed...

Which makes it hard to follow...

And sucks away any suspense...

 

But The Social Reckoning...

Does enable Sorkin to show us...

The Real Zuck...

Or at least the version of which Kara Swisher would approve ...

 

But I'm not sure Kara got what she wanted...

 

Even if The Social Reckoning is a very Karen-coded movie...

Because not only does it take on Zuck...

There is a racist rant by... of course... a blond white girl...

Lots of right-wing extremism...

 

Which apparently, in Sorkin’s mind ...

Is the only kind that exists...

 

And Jan 6 ...

 

Which Sorkin recreates in his film as a massive bloody riot led by unhinged Trump supporters...

And which serves as the dramatic climax of this film...

To which he devotes a lot of screen time...

 

Because it is supposed to represent the culmination of the evil perpetrated by the Facebook algorithm...

 

So there is lots of head bashing on the Capitol steps...

While Sorkin conveniently leaves out the only death that day...

The shooting of an unarmed protester by a Capitol policeman with a dicey record...

 

But everything bad that happens in this movie...

Is the result of Facebook’s manipulation of the algorithm ...

Because it leads the Right....

And, of course, only the Right...

To act in ways detrimental to the nation......

 

Leaving the impression that only one side of the political spectrum

Was manipulated by the Facebook algorithm......

 

So there is not a word about social media and the George Floyd riots...

Or the burning of that Minneapolis Police station...

 

Ok...

 

Now, according to this film..

This right-wing extremism only happened...

Because real journalists...

You know...

Those purveyors of truth...

 

Were losing their jobs...

Because of new technology..

 

Which is symbolized in The Social Reckoning...

By the half-empty Wall Street Journal office...

 

So the much-needed filter that had long been used ...

To decide what facts we should see ...

Was disappearing with every old media job...

 

Now The Social Reckoning is in part a Woodward and Bernstein fantasy...

About how an intrepid Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, Jeff Horowitz....

Played by Jeremy Allen White...

Got the scoop about how Facebook manipulated the algorithm that led to right-wing extremism...

From a brave whistleblower...

Portrayed quite underwhelmingly by Mikey Madison...

 

Confirming what I suspected last year...which is that she only won that Oscar... Because she played a hooker...

And Hollywood loves actresses who play hookers...

 

Horowitz goes on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting...

Which these days is about as impressive as winning a Nobel Peace Prize...

Because getting a Pulitzer puts you right up there with Janet Cooke...

And the journalists who reported so breathlessly about the Trump/Russia story...

 

But according to The Social Reckoning...

We desperately need professional journalists...

To decide what news we should see...

 

But Aaron...

 

Do you mean like those reporters at the New York Times...

Who said a Trump Presidency was so dangerous for the country ...

That journalistic objectivity should be suspended?

 

Now this sets up the exchange between Zuckerberg...

And Bill Barr, who plays his Greek chorus...

Who argues that people aren’t smart enough to figure out for themselves...

What information to believe...

 

They need experts to do that for them...

 

But the problem for this movie...

And I suspect for Kara Swisher, if she was paying careful attention...

 

Is that Strong as Zuckerberg ....

Delivers a monologue in support of free speech that is quite compelling....

 

And his performance makes Zuck look authentic...

In his belief about the sanctity of the First Amendment....

 

As well as persuasive as to why Facebook should not be in the business of deciding...

Which information people should be allowed to see...

 

And so Strong’s performance steps all over the message of this movie...

 

And then there is the problem of the scene set in a grocery store during Covid...

Which depicts a woman refusing to wear a mask...

Supposedly an example of how disinformation about Covid put people’s lives in danger...

 

Except...

Aaron... did you not notice that particular ship has sailed?

 

Because the experts...

 

Who had the imprimatur from professional journalists...

The government...

And... for the purpose of this film... the social media censors...

When they finally saw the light....

 

The very people The Social Reckoning wants to convince us...

Should decide what information people should be allowed to see ....

 

Told everyone to social distance...

Closed down the economy... and the schools..

And told us information about the origin of the virus...

That some of them knew at the time wasn’t true...

 

So... Aaron... was it really smart to remind your audience of this?

 

And in the dramatic climax of the film...

Zuck has his Come to Jesus moment...

And censors the sitting President of the United States...

 

The final triumph for those “deserving” arbiters of truth...

As Zuck realizes he should give up on free speech...

And participate in censoring what the American people should see...

 

But that only reminds us that what followed was an orgy of media censorship...

 

Twitter’s Truth and Safety Council...

Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership...

How Facebook ...along with other social media platforms...

Censored news about the origin of Covid...

Among many other things...

 

How information that might have been pertinent to the 2020 election was suppressed...

The Biden administration’s pressure on social media to censor its political opponents... 

As well as its attempt to create a White House run Disinformation Governance Board...

With its own Czar...

 

All of which led to abuses... and a backlash...

Which was why many of those “guardrails” have now been abandoned...

 

As well as to the realization that when one side censors ...

No surprise...

The other will attempt to do so as well...

 

So this film seems a bit naïve...

A Sorkin fever dream of what he wished existed...

 

But that genie has now long been out of the bottle...

 

There is TikTok, Blue Sky, Truth Social...

Meta’s Threads...

YouTube...

As well as a Twitter now known as X...

And now there is AI...

 

Zuck may have figured out how to use clickbait to keep eyeballs...

 

But he was never alone...

 

However, there is one scene in this film...

Which is not about social media and politics...

And has great current resonance...

 

Because the bullying of children on social media...

Is on every parent’s mind...

But The Social Reckoning gives this problem only brief attention....

 

Despite the fact that this is what has sent Meta...

Along with the other social media platforms....

Into courtrooms across the nation...

 

But how this problem is handled in this movie...

Is a tell...

 

The father in this scene begs Facebook...

DO SOMETHING...

Ignoring the fact.... that he could just take the phone away from his child...

 

But that doesn’t fit the narrative of this movie...

 

Which is that consumers of social media are incapable of being responsible...

For how they use this technology...

Or what facts they choose to believe...

 

So they need a Big Brother to make decisions for them...

 

And that sounds like something...

Of which Dario Amodei would enthusiastically approve...

 

Which... frankly...

 

Frightens me more than Facebook’s algorithm...

 

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