Why ‘The Social Reckoning’ Fails

The Social Reckoning opens on the side of the highway. Police pull up on a white woman, whose car is pouring smoke. She’s drunk, and not civil; the interaction between her and the police escalates, until she whips out her phone and starts berating the officers, hurling racist insults, before they arrest her.

“Watch me own DEI cops” is the caption accompanying the video, posted to a fictional right-wing Facebook page called “Voice of Reason.” It catches the attention of Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, a data scientist on Facebook’s “civic integrity” team—which was established, we later learn, “to create tension between growth and safety” inside the tech company. Haugen knows the Karen flipping out in the video from a workout class and, get this, the woman was a progressive before she became a Facebook power user and then, apparently, a right-wing extremist.

As Haugen tells anyone who’ll listen, that’s no coincidence: As she tries to tell her boss, then her deskmate, and then Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she “ran a classifier on 251 political groups” and “30 percent of content hits multiple risk factors,” including political polarization and misinformation. Wow, multiple risk factors? You can imagine what captivating cinema this all makes for.