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“The Social Reckoning,” the follow-up to the 2010 hit “The Social Network,” is facing blistering critiques from both sides of the political spectrum alongside lukewarm reviews from critics, with some reviewers sharply criticizing the film’s political messaging and its handling of Facebook’s role in American politics.
“The Social Network” focused on the creation of Facebook and the legal battle over its ownership, earning three Oscars, including for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and a 96% positive rating on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s more political follow-up, “The Social Reckoning,” written and directed by Sorkin, has received a more mixed response, with a 61% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes as of Thursday evening.
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Earlier this year, a trailer debuted showing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jeremy Strong) being questioned by a character played by comedian Bill Burr. In the scene, Zuckerberg defends online free speech and argues that users are responsible for their own behavior. Burr’s character vigorously challenges him.
Sorkin published an open letter in 2019 criticizing Zuckerberg’s management of the platform.
OutKick writer Ian Miller was one of several conservative critics who mocked the trailer as tone-deaf, replying, “It is the most Hollywood thing ever to desperately try and convince everyone that the guy making complete sense is the bad guy and the one demanding authoritarian ideological enforcement is the good guy.”
The new film vilifying Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his platform has received mixed reviews, some of them decidedly negative compared to the 2010 hit “The Social Network.” (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Film critics were also sharply critical. The Globe and Mail film critic Barry Hertz tweeted that the film was “one of the most insipid, ugly, flat films of the year — an insufferably sanctimonious fantasia of blue-state Boomers.”
In his actual review, he argued that the movie is counterproductive in that it “will turn even the most hardcore Facebook hater into a true-blue Facebook believer — the film is just that magnificently, unbelievably, despicably bad.”
Variety said it badly missed the original’s director David Fincher and “already feels behind the curve,” while Wired magazine’s review described the new film as one that “already feels irrelevant.”
Wired noted that the movie opens with the DUI arrest of a woman who directs racist, right-wing insults at police officers and is arrested for threatening to kill one of them. When the video goes viral, a Facebook whistleblower recognizes the woman as a former liberal acquaintance from her Pilates class.
The film’s climax, as noted by Wired, is the Jan. 6, 2021, capitol riot, “the horrors of which are blamed in part on Facebook’s failure to either get a handle on election fraud conspiracy theories or remove Donald Trump’s account as he stoked such inflammatory falsehoods.”
“Now, halfway into Trump’s second term, is it all that much of a revelation that he and his movement are emboldened by the complicity of tech oligarchs, who openly backed him in 2024?” the outlet asked.
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Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs court after taking the stand at a trial in a case accusing Meta and Google’s YouTube of harming kids’ mental health through addictive platforms, in Los Angeles Feb. 18, 2026. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Journalist and film critic Stephen Silver described the movie as “an old-man-yells-at-cloud treatment of Facebook.” Silver wrote that Sorkin essentially argues Facebook was not censorious enough in the 2010s and that the government should now step in by reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that generally shields online platforms from liability for content posted by users.
“No, I don’t buy that Facebook is primarily responsible for American political extremism, or for January 6,” Silver wrote, arguing that individuals remain responsible for their own actions online.
SFGate’s Lindsey Bahr wrote that while certain political aspects hit the mark, the movie falls far short of its predecessor: “It is unfortunate for ‘The Social Reckoning’ that ‘The Social Network’ exists.”
IndieWire was even harsher, panning its script and performances.
The BBC’s reviewer gave it two out of five stars, calling it unlikely to influence anyone, while The Guardian in a mixed review dismissed it as a “film which doesn’t reckon with the future we’re living in.”
Even some reviews rated as positive on Rotten Tomatoes were tepid in their assessments. A review from The Seattle Times said it moved “snappily” but was still a “pale imitation” of “The Social Network.”
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Media Research Center President David Bozell commented on the film’s political messaging to Fox News Digital.
“It says everything you need to know about Aaron Sorkin and the Hollywood elite that they would make a movie suggesting Big Tech’s real failure was not censoring conservatives enough,” Bozell said.
“The Media Research Center spent years exposing how Facebook suppressed conservative voices, and we were right to do it,” he continued. “Mark Zuckerberg eventually acknowledged Meta’s past censorship abuses and took meaningful steps to move the company back toward a more open platform. Meta is far from perfect, but Zuckerberg deserves some credit for redirecting it away from the censorship monster it had become.
“Hollywood seems determined to fight yesterday’s battle even as Zuckerberg has moved on from it,” Bozell added. “Americans have had enough of government-imposed censorship, ideological gatekeeping and Big Tech deciding which political views they are allowed to hear.”
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Among the more positive reviews of the movie came from the San Francisco Chronicle, praising it as a “stirring journalistic thriller.”
