Fifteen years after The Social Network turned the creation of Facebook into one of Hollywood’s most compelling tales of ambition, betrayal and billion-dollar egos, writer-director Aaron Sorkin is back with The Social Reckoning, a far more troubling chapter in the story of the social media giant. Opening in theaters today, October 9, the film shifts the focus from the audacious beginnings of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire to the potentially devastating consequences of what that empire has become. This time, the question isn’t who gets credit for inventing Facebook. It’s what happens when the company behind one of the world’s most influential platforms discovers that its own internal research may reveal just how much damage it is doing. Inspired by real events, The Social Reckoning follows Frances Haugen, the former Facebook engineer who became one of the company’s most consequential whistleblowers, and Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who helped bring her revelations to the public. Together, they expose internal documents suggesting that Facebook knew far more about the harmful effects of its products than it had acknowledged publicly. It’s a natural subject for Sorkin, whose gift for rapid-fire dialogue, high-stakes confrontations and morally complicated institutions helped make The Social Network a modern classic. But while the earlier film captured the intoxicating thrill of a technological revolution, its companion piece takes a decidedly darker view of what happens when that revolution goes largely unchecked. The result is an ambitious, occasionally gripping drama that raises important questions about corporate responsibility, misinformation and the price society pays for a business model built around keeping people online. Yet the film also struggles to turn a story whose implications are enormous into a consistently engaging cinematic experience. One of the film’s biggest assets is its cast, which brings together several of today’s most compelling performers to portray people who found themselves at the center of a defining moment in the technology industry. Mikey Madison, fresh off her Oscar-winning performance in Anora, takes on Haugen, the data engineer who decided that remaining silent was no longer an option. In 2021, Haugen came forward with internal Facebook documents that helped fuel a Wall Street Journal investigative series examining the company’s handling of misinformation, harassment, political content and research into Instagram’s effects on teenage girls. Haugen’s disclosures also raised questions about Facebook’s content-ranking algorithms and whether the company’s efforts to maximize engagement could amplify anger and divisive material. Her decision to go public culminated in congressional testimony that put the company’s internal deliberations under a harsh spotlight. Madison has the difficult task of making a whistleblower’s story dramatically compelling without losing sight of the real person behind the headlines. Haugen was neither a conventional crusader nor an outsider looking in. She was an employee who had believed in the platform’s potential and ultimately came to believe that the public deserved to know what the company’s own research revealed. That tension gives the story its most intriguing human dimension: the uneasy realization that exposing wrongdoing can mean turning against the very institution one once hoped to improve. Jeremy Allen White, meanwhile, plays Horwitz, the journalist whose reporting helped turn Haugen’s evidence into a major public reckoning. Best known for his emotionally raw work in The Bear, White brings a different sensibility to the role of an investigative reporter navigating the complicated process of corroborating sensitive information, protecting a source and getting the story right. Horwitz may not be as recognizable a public figure as Zuckerberg, but his role underscores an essential point: whistleblowers need journalists who can turn private revelations into a documented public record. The partnership between Haugen and Horwitz provides the film with its investigative...