Back in June, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin announced that he would write and direct a follow-up to The Social Network, the 2010 film he scripted for acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher. Unlike the previous film, which focused on the legal depositions that engulfed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the years immediately after he launched the website, Sorkin’s project, titled The Social Reckoning, will focus on company whistleblower Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz.
In 2021, Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, leaked thousands of pages of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal. Haugen’s revelations formed the basis for the newspaper’s Facebook Files series, which alleged that the social media platform was “riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.” Haugen’s leaks revealed that the company’s algorithm amplified incendiary political content, that the site exempted certain high-profile users from rules against “misinformation” and “hate speech,” and that executives had disregarded recommendations to strengthen the platform’s “fact-checking” capabilities.
These revelations echoed many of the most popular sentiments expressed by prominent figures in media and politics during President Joe Biden’s tenure. At that time, the establishment consensus was that social media platforms like Facebook had contributed to evils like the January 6 riot, vaccine hesitancy, and the spread of COVID-19 “misinformation.” This consensus found its fullest expression during Biden’s September 2022 “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech, in which the former president accused “MAGA Republicans” of fomenting authoritarianism, calling them “a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.” Supporters of Biden’s message, fearing that then-former President Donald Trump would return to the White House, insisted that the only way to stem the rising tide of tyranny was to impede the MAGA movement’s ability to promote its ideology via social media. If Silicon Valley failed to comply, it would spell the end of American democracy.
Sorkin agreed with that prognosis. During an appearance on the Town podcast in April 2024, the Hollywood veteran said, “I blame Facebook for January 6.” He also accused the company of “tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” implying that the platform has an obligation to suppress controversial content. In October 2019, Sorkin published an open letter to Zuckerberg in The New York Times, in which he criticized the Facebook CEO for allowing political candidates to post “demonstrably false ads” on the platform. “That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth,” Sorkin argued. He also suggested that Internet content carriers should be held legally liable for the material their users publish, implicitly calling for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934. While the Academy Award-winning screenwriter expressed admiration for the First Amendment to the Constitution, he seems to believe that the federal government should punish private social media platforms unless they subject their users to rigorous standards of content moderation.
In October 2021, shortly after Frances Haugen first disclosed her identity on 60 Minutes, Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece criticizing the media’s glorification of the Facebook whistleblower. He argued that Haugen’s disclosures were only being celebrated because powerful actors in media and politics saw her revelations as an opportunity to demand additional censorship from Facebook. According to Greenwald, “Facebook’s only real political problem” lay in the fact that it was not using “[its] power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers.”
Four years later, the world is a very different place. With Donald Trump back in the White House and congressional Democrats in the minority, liberals seem to be rethinking their eagerness to make censorship demands of private corporations. While this shift is driven more by political considerations than genuine principles, it still represents a noteworthy development. Earlier this month, Sorkin joined hundreds of his industry peers in signing an open letter published by the newly reconstituted Committee for the First Amendment. “The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry,” the letter claims. The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was emblematic of this trend. But so too were the Biden administration’s efforts to circumvent the First Amendment and pressure social media companies to censor user speech. The Social Reckoning is still a year away from arriving in theaters, but one can only hope that it will reflect a new political sensibility, one that rejects the notion that freedom can be saved by silencing people.
