The Social Reckoning

With the cost of everything creeping – and in some cases, escalating – ever upward, a Curzon Cinemas membership which I’ve held for years will now definitely be cancelled, and this was the last ‘free’ booking that came with my membership that expires at the end of November. ‘Free’, in inverted commas, because the membership costs £70, and with five tickets a year included, it’s basically £14 each. It will probably creep up again if I were to renew. By contrast, the local Odeon cinema charges £10.99 per movie if you book online and £12.49 if you book in person. Alternatively for £19.99 per month, you can see as many movies at Odeon as you want. It was also interesting, to me anyway, and not altogether surprising, that I spoke to nobody at all going into the screen. No ticket checks were in place (boo!), though at least it also meant nobody was trying to sell me overpriced beverages either (yay!).

Mind you, the screen was busier than I’ve seen it at Curzon for a while, I suppose partly because it was a Saturday, and the movie I was seeing, The Social Reckoning, had only gone on general release the previous day. I only picked it because I was looking for a reason to use the sole remaining ticket on my membership before I call it a day on Curzon, and as I’d seen its ‘companion’ movie, The Social Network, a few years ago (Reckoning is not exactly a sequel), I thought this would be a fitting choice for my Curzon membership swansong.

In the end, it turned out to be a far from gripping watch. Bogged down in details, the story follows Facebook’s attempts to deal with the fallout resulting from a series of articles by Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). Horwitz had elicited the help of everyone in Facebook’s Civil Integrity Team by writing personalised messages to each of them: only one, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) responded, and thus began a series of exchanges which eventually resulted in the leaking of thousands of internal documents. In essence, Facebook, or Meta as the overarching company which also now includes Instagram and WhatsApp is called, and particularly its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), was so committed to ‘free speech’ that it had provided a platform for far-right and extremist views. Inadvertently? No, because its internal data findings demonstrated it was a problem.

The film effectively asserts that if it were not for Facebook, the mob attack on the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021 might not have happened, or if it had gone ahead anyway, it would have done so with significantly fewer participants, because the details of the attack wouldn’t have been so widely publicised. But it spends too long dithering about, with Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), a crisis management specialist, coaching Zuckerberg through what to say and how to say it at what I think was a forthcoming Congressional hearing of some kind. Don’t say this, don’t say it like that, nod your head at the appropriate moment to show agreement, and in the appropriate way, and on and on. The only testimony heard by Congress as shown in the film was in the form of prepared statements by whistleblower Haugen. A long series of written text was displayed as an epilogue to tell the audience what happened after that, best summarised as ‘Nothing Has Changed!’.

It would be too harsh to describe this film as a complete waste of time, and indeed there are some intriguing parallels between the use of technological algorithms at Facebook and the ethical and moral dilemmas they pose and the exorbitant rise of artificial intelligence more widely. All those facts, figures and statistics felt like ‘death by PowerPoint’, and perhaps surprisingly, I felt myself siding with Strong’s Zuckerberg when he tells someone presenting to him to hurry up and get to the salient points. Overall, though, meh.

Three stars