Jeff, for his part, was a smooth professional handler, providing Frances with a burner phone pre-installed with his number. When Frances became frustrated that her boss ignored her concerns, she decided to provide the files to Jeff, who said he couldn’t personally operate any of her electronic devices, but she could leave them open so he could view them. (Sorkin made sure to recall the whistleblower’s grandfather, Daniel Ellsberg.) Jeff also took the information Francis provided and ran with it, conducting a separate experiment with the help of Evelyn, who mimicked the Facebook activity of people like Francis’ activist friends to see what the algorithm would throw at her.
However, the connection between Frances and Jeff is more than beneficial; They discovered they had a lot in common. Both are different types of nerds. While Francis is technically savvy, he’s also surprisingly literary, providing fodder for several of Sorkin’s snappy scenes. When a Facebook executive (Billy Magnussen) cynically compares her to the mythical prophet Cassandra, whom he likens to the boy who cried wolf, she corrects him: Unlike the shepherd boy, Cassandra is alert to real dangers. Later, Frances explains to Jeff that what made her take the risk of contacting him were the high ideals she absorbed from art and literature. Still, she told him she never intended to be Frank Capra’s character, an apparent reference to Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jeff, meanwhile, is a classical musical theater fan and has “Show Boat” blaring in the background when she calls, and he owns far more Capra works than she does. Both men are single—Sorkin shows Francis on a disastrous date with a finance bro who himself absorbed misinformation from Facebook—and their collaboration is anchored by their mutual acknowledgment of themselves as clever misfits.
Frances, however, was more out of place. After all, Jeff is part of the social profession, a caller and persuader, whose intellect is less purely intellectual and more comprehensive, while Frances is a classic academic nerd, strong in all subjects, confident in her understanding and impatient with those who are slower to understand. (Jeff calls her a “terrible scumbag.”) She’s detail-oriented, literal-minded, intellectually confident, and outraged by its social cost. In fact, she plays the same character in “Social Reckoning” that Mark Zuckerberg played in “The Social Network”: she’s a genius whose insight, passion and inspiration are the engine of the story, and she’s a delightful and wonderful character in the film. Jeff, on the other hand, plays in this drama like Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) did in his earlier movie. He is a more worldly player and his experience and institutional connections will be crucial for this talent to make an impact on the world stage.
While The Social Reckoning is as broad in scope as its predecessor, it feels much narrower. Its scope extends to the highest echelons of power—tech giants, powerful newspapers, the halls of Congress—at such a critical moment as the dawn of a new century. coronavirus-19 pandemic, 2020 election, attempted coup on January 6th, but it still feels small. Part of that is because Sorkin’s narrative jumps back and forth between events in 2019, 2020 and 2021, forcing scenes to be simple for the sake of clarity. Perhaps life itself feels smaller now than it did in the era depicted in The Social Network, perhaps because of the shift in attention caused by social media. Life used to mean looking up at the world outside, but now with your head down, staring at a tiny screen, a more real, real side of life seems to be happening, absurdly. The recent turn of online life has no personal or public history in the film, which adds little to the impact of this epochal shift. Sorkin’s story is put together precisely, its message distributed to produce pieces that fit together precisely, with no excess. As a result, the characters are stripped of any characteristics that would be detrimental to the outcome—and so is the world around them.
In “Social Reckoning,” Zuckerberg first appears in a lecture hall at Facebook, appearing before a Senate committee under the guidance of a public relations strategist named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku). He will be asked about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and is set to testify that repealing it would “kill the web” by forcing Facebook and other platforms to censor and suppress (or, he said, censor people’s posts). (He would suggest that online and social media require appropriate regulation by Congress itself through law.) But there is no discussion of why Section 230 is so important, which is that it defines online platforms as common carriers rather than publishers, similar to phone companies rather than newspapers. Just like phone providers are not responsible for callers’ fraudulent or defamatory statements, email services and social media sites enjoy similar immunity.