Jeff is a professional manager who provides Frances with a clunky phone loaded with his own number. When Frances, disappointed that her bosses are ignoring her concerns, decides to give Jeff the documents, he says that she physically cannot use any of his electronic devices, but that Jeff can leave them on and she can look at them. (Sorkin makes sure to credit the whistleblower’s grandfather, Daniel Ellsberg.) Jeff also takes the information Frances provided and uses it to run a separate experiment with the help of Evelyn, who spoofs the Facebook activity of someone like Frances’s radical friend to see what the algorithm will bring her.
But the bond between Frances and Jeff is not just instrumental; They discover that they have a lot in common. Both are different types of cows. Although fluent in technology, Frances is also exceptionally literary, providing Sorkin with material for many quickly written scenes. When a Facebook administrator (Billy Magnussen) disparagingly likens her to the legendary prophetess Cassandra, likening her to the boy who cried wolf, the administrator points her in the right direction: Unlike the shepherd boy, Cassandra was alert to real danger. Later, Frances explains to Jeff that it was the high ideals she gained from art and literature that made her take the risk of contacting him. However, he tells her that he never intended to be a Frank Capra character, meaning the characters Jimmy Stewart played in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jeff, meanwhile, is a classical musical nerd who plays “Show Boat” in the background when he calls and has more Capra acts up his sleeve than he does. Both are single (Sorkin shows Frances on a disastrous date with a financier brother who also got misinformation from Facebook), and their mutual recognition as smart misfits seals their collaboration.
Frances, on the other hand, is much more of a misfit. After all, Jeff is part of a social profession, a seeker and persuader, and his intellect is less intellectual and more comprehensive, while Frances is the consummate academic nerd, strong in all subjects, assertive in her understanding, impatient with those who are slower in their understanding. (Jeff calls him “a frightening villain.”) He’s detail-oriented and fiercely down-to-earth, full of intellectual confidence and fed up with the social cost of it. In fact, he plays in “The Social Reckoning” the same role that Mark Zuckerberg did in “The Social Network”: the genius whose insight, passion and inspiration are the engine of the story, and the character the film looks at in a smiling and wonderful way. On the other hand, Jeff serves the same role in the series as Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) in the previous film. He’s a world-class actor whose genius character needs experience and corporate connections to make an impact on the world stage.
Although “The Social Reckoning” has as broad a scope as its predecessor, it leaves a much narrower impression. At critical times, such as the beginning of a war, it extends to the highest levels of power—a tech giant, a mighty newspaper, the halls of Congress. COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 elections, the coup attempt on January 6, but it still feels small. This is partly because Sorkin’s narrative, which jumps back and forth in time between events in 2019, 2020, and 2021, forces scenes into stark simplicity for the sake of clarity. And perhaps because of the shift in attention brought about by social media, life itself now feels smaller compared to the era depicted in “The Social Network.” Where life used to mean living with their heads up and looking at the world in general, now their heads are turned down, staring absurdly at small screens where the more literal and real side of life takes place. The film has no personal or public history of the recent return to online life, giving almost no role to this groundbreaking transition. Sorkin’s story is assembled with precision, information distributed in a way that creates pieces that fit together neatly and without excess. As a result, characters are stripped of any traits that do not serve the outcome; So is the world around them.
In “Social Reckoning,” Zuckerberg first appears before a Senate committee in a Facebook conference room, under the coaching of a public relations strategist named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku). He will be asked about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and is prepared to state that repealing that section would “kill the internet” by forcing Facebook and other platforms to review and suppress or censor people’s posts. (He will argue that the internet and social media must be properly regulated by law by Congress itself.) But there is no disputing what makes Section 230 so important, namely that it defines internet platforms as common carriers rather than broadcasters, akin to telephone companies rather than newspapers. Just as a telephone provider is not liable for fraud or defamatory statements made by callers, similar immunity is granted to email services and social media sites.