What The Social Reckoning gets right — and wrong

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning has its fair share of cinematic flair, but many details in the story hew closely to real life. The movie tells the story of how Frances Haugen, a Facebook civic integrity product manager, came to leak a large trove of internal documents to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, in what would later become a 2021 series called “The Facebook Files.” In both real life and in the film, Haugen’s leaks lead her to testify as a congressional whistleblower. The final frames of the movie describe the impact she had even after that closing scene, speaking before governments around the world and bolstering lawsuits against Meta nationwide with the internal communications she disclosed. The film’s Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, says that she really believes in Facebook, echoing a message the real Haugen left for her colleagues just before she signed off for her last day in May 2021. “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote on the company’s internal message board, according to The Journal. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.” Sorkin, both directing and screenwriting the semi-follow up to 2010’s The Social Network, which he only wrote,…