Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, written and directed by the prominent screenwriter and produced by Sony, isn’t a movie about Facebook, even though it is based on the social media giant’s story and its controversial global impact.
This is actually political activism with a running time of 112 minutes.
In April 2024, on The Town podcast, Sorkin said, “I blame Facebook for January 6” – and when asked why, he said, “You’re going to need to buy a movie ticket.”
He didn’t stop there. Sorkin, who is known for his TV series The West Wing and The Newsroom, as well as films like The Social Network, said, “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. There’s just growth.”
On the same podcast, Sorkin referred to the 2024 election as “an election about Trump vs. not-Trump, and there is an existential choice there.”
He directed it himself to get it out before the midterms: “I didn’t want The Social Reckoning to come out a year after the midterm elections,” and “I wanted it to come out now.”
The timing of the movie’s release, and the fact it was directed by Sorkin himself to make that happen, is not the only clue that this is a piece of political persuasion.
Aaron Sorkin and Sony Pictures are trying very hard to sell The Social Reckoning as something it’s not – but in the process, they are also inadvertently revealing what it actually is.
“I’m not going to deny, of course, that the movie is political,” Sorkin told Politico, as reported by TheWrap. “I just think it shouldn’t be.”
On NBC’s Today show, he went for the “anti-truth” angle: “The film shouldn’t be political unless you are somebody who is anti-the truth, okay?”
So those who don’t accept Sorkin’s truth are anti-the-truth.
On CBS, he said that if he ever got the chance to talk to Mark Zuckerberg, he would tell him, “You want to make the world a better place? Don’t make the truth up for grabs.”
Sorkin is not interested in argument. He is interested in selling his movie. And he has a willing partner in Sony, whose CEO, Tom Rothman, said, “I’m a free speech absolutist too, but I know you can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater. I know that there is a difference between free speech and falsehood.”
(Yes, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater.)
As for falsehood – who gets to decide what that is? Sorkin and Rothman? Meta’s “fact-checkers”? The government?
