By Rollo Ross
LOS ANGELES, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Social Network," wasn't looking to make another movie about Facebook.
Sorkin had been struggling to find an idea for a new project when he met Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower whose disclosures raised concerns about the impact on health, safety and global politics of the company's social media platforms. The story he crafted, told in the film "The Social Reckoning," will debut
in theaters on Friday.
"I was looking for a good story, and after a period of about a year of just epic writer's block, of not being able to come up with any story, I met Frances Haugen, and suddenly a good story started to take shape in my head," Sorkin, who also directed the movie, said in an interview with Reuters.
"The Social Network," released in 2010, told the origin story of Facebook, which has since changed its name to Meta, and starred Jesse Eisenberg as founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The new movie centers on Haugen and journalist Jeff Horwitz, who wrote a series for the Wall Street Journal called "The Facebook Files" that began in 2021 and was based largely on thousands of internal documents that she provided to him.
"It is a David and Goliath story, but there are two Davids," Sorkin said. "One is Frances. She picks up a rock and throws it at Facebook, and the other is print journalism. They pick up a rock and they throw it at tech."
Horwitz, who later detailed the story in his 2023 book "Broken Code," now works as an investigative reporter for Reuters and remained on the Meta beat, earning a Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting this year with colleague Engen Tham for reports that exposed how Meta permitted its chatbots to engage in provocative behavior and earned billions of dollars in revenue from fraudulent ads.
Sony Pictures bought the rights to his life story in connection to his previous Facebook reporting when employed by the Wall Street Journal. "The Social Reckoning" is a fictionalized account of events, and it does not draw upon Horwitz's reporting about Facebook, Instagram or Meta since he joined Reuters in 2025.
The film chronicles Haugen's meetings with Horwitz starting in December 2020 and her reluctance to go public. Haugen eventually concludes the revelations will be more powerful with her name attached and decides to speak on the record. She also testifies before Congress to explain how she believed Facebook's algorithm was boosting divisive content in pursuit of profits.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the film.
When Haugen testified, Facebook said the company disagreed with her characterization of how it operated. Zuckerberg defended the company in a Facebook post, writing that "the argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical."
In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade to strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram under a settlement with US states. The company denied wrongdoing and said ensuring that teens have a "safe and productive experience on our platforms" was an "absolute imperative" for the company.
'WHAT I DO IS A PAINTING'
While Horwitz wasn't involved in the film's production and had no say over its content, he did meet with Sorkin and answered his questions about the reporting process and his relationship with Haugen. According to Horwitz, Sorkin said he would use some artistic license.
"He told me that he thought he'd need to change some chronology and details to make the story he had in mind work," said Horwitz, who did not read the script until it was finished. "He also told me that he wanted to take some liberties with 'Movie Jeff,' who was sort of going to be a fictionalized, investigative reporter composite. It was definitely going to be an 'inspired by, not based on' situation."
Sorkin said major facts of the story are accurate, although he had to create conversations and a timeline to make a compelling cinematic narrative.
"People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a narrative by the end. People don't speak in dialogue. Those are things that screenwriters do," Sorkin said.
"What you do as a journalist, that's a photograph," he added. "What I do is a painting."
Zuckerberg, a supporting character in "The Social Reckoning," is played this time by "Succession" actor Jeremy Strong. Eisenberg declined the chance to reprise the role. "The Bear" star Jeremy Allen White portrays Horwitz, and Haugen is played by Mikey Madison, who won an Oscar for her role in "Anora."
(Reporting by Rollo Ross in Los Angeles;Additional reporting by Lisa RichwineEditing by Rosalba O'Brien)
