What The Social Reckoning got right and wrong

Aaron Sorkin’s The social report has its share of cinematic flair, but many story details are close to real life. The film tells the story of how Frances Haugen, civic integrity product manager at Facebook, came to disclose a large quantity of internal documents to Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz, in what would later become a 2021 series called “The Facebook Files.” In both real life and the film, Haugen’s leaks lead her to testify as a congressional whistleblower. The final frames of the film depict the impact she had even after that final scene, speaking before governments around the world and bolstering the prosecution of Meta nationwide through the internal communications she leaked.

The film’s Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, says she really believes in Facebook, echoing a message the real Haugen left for her colleagues just before signing off for her last day in May 2021. “I don’t hate Facebook,” she wrote on the company’s internal forum, according to The Review. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

Sorkin, both director and screenwriter of the semi-follow-up until the 2010s The social networkthat he only wrote, took some liberties with the dialogue and the chronology of the film. The most obvious is that he condensed the timeline and moved major events forward by several months. Some key moments in the film — Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) preparing for a congressional hearing on disinformation and extremism and Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) preparing to release the first report on Facebook Files — occur on the same day, which happens to be January 6, 2021, in the midst of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In fact, Zuckerberg testified in the House alongside other tech CEOs in March 2021, and the first installment of the Facebook files wasn’t released until September.

But the film draws directly from Horwitz’s investigation and documents collected by Haugen, which show how the company applied its content moderation policies inconsistently, pushed users toward hate groups and had little response to apparent human trafficking on the platform. Meta declined to comment on the film, but in past statements the company has referred to the documents Haugen collected and their narrative in Facebook files as being selected to serve a specific narrative. Zuckerberg called the Facebook Files report “a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to misrepresent our company” during a 2021 earnings call after the initial reports were released, and said that in the face of “impossible tradeoffs…these questions are not primarily about our company, but about balancing different difficult social values.” Here’s what you need to know about the real events behind the film.

Losing a friend to the rabbit hole of misinformation inspired Haugen

The social report opens with a young blonde woman standing next to her overheating car on the side of a highway. When the cops stop to ask if she’s okay and smell alcohol on her breath, the exchange quickly becomes tense. The woman appears disconcerted by the officer, a person of color, and takes out her phone to record him; soon she threatens violence and is arrested. Next, we see Madison’s Haugen in her apartment watching the video the woman posted on her Facebook page, “Voice of Reason,” with the caption “Watch me own the DEI cops.” Haugen later reveals that the woman was a friend she met in spin class, radicalized by conspiracy theories on Facebook after the defeat of the progressive candidate she campaigned for.

The scene and details regarding the friend appear to be fictional, but are based on a real part of Haugen’s story. Haugen said The Review that she took on a role on Facebook’s civic integrity team after seeing a family friend radicalized online. “It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone because of it,” she said.

Facebook algorithm recommends extremist groups

In the film, one of the first major revelations that Haugen shares with White’s Horwitz is that 64 percent of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook were sent there by its algorithm. This statistic – in the film and in real life – became the basis for a May 2020 article in The Review. In the actual article, Horwitz and co-author Deepa Seetharaman wrote that a 2016 internal Facebook presentation revealed that “64% of all extremist group memberships are due to our recommendation tools.” He adds: “Our recommendation systems make the problem worse. » At the time the 2020 article was published, a Facebook spokesperson said The Review it has since strengthened protections and “is no longer the same company today”.

A change in Facebook’s algorithm sparked anger

As they flip through the film’s pages of materials, Haugen and Horwitz continue to try to understand why Facebook adjusted its recommendation algorithm to reward “meaningful social interactions” (MSI), rather than likes, in 2018. Haugen’s sentiments in favor of MSI could push users like her friend toward radicalization, but she and Horwitz aren’t initially sure how — especially since Facebook has publicly said this change is meant to undermine engagement. They understand that the new ranking system weights emoji reactions and shares much more than likes; Zuckerberg and other leaders knew this change would encourage anger to be shared.

That’s a pretty accurate translation of what we know about MSI. Zuckerberg promoted this change as a way to correct a trend of “public content” from brands and media “crowding out the personal moments that cause us to connect more with each other.” Although he expected the change to be beneficial for users, he said it would actually hurt Facebook’s engagement. But, he added, “if we do the right thing, I think it will also benefit our community and our business in the long run.”

In a payment of The Journal’However, in the 2021 “Facebook Files” series, Horwitz and co-author Keach Hagey found that Facebook employees warned that prioritizing MSI promoted more angry engagement. Documents obtained by The Review showed that before the change, Facebook was concerned about declining user engagement through actions such as sharing or commenting. To combat this, the documents show, Facebook has tried to encourage more original posts and shares. While Facebook found some positive benefits of the change for users, researchers found that “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are excessively prevalent among resharers.” Zuckerberg, in the film and apparently in real life, has resisted some mitigation proposals that could harm engagement.

Meta downplayed the importance of MSI. In a statement to The Review At the time, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said: “Is a rankings change the source of global divisions? No. »

Instagram Made Teen Girls Feel Worse About Their Bodies

In the film, Haugen’s colleague shares a USB drive containing documents, including a study on how Instagram harms teenage girls’ body image. She told Haugen to spread the word before the company started marketing Instagram Kids. It’s unclear whether this co-worker actually existed, but the information she shared appears to be based on an internal study that found that 32 percent of teenage girls surveyed who reported feeling bad about their bodies felt worse after using Instagram. Instagram had in fact planned to launch a service specifically aimed at children under 13, but shortly announced, amid the outcry over the publication of “Facebook Files”, that it was suspending the project to respond to concerns.

An early Facebook investor encouraged Zuckerberg to change

As Strong’s Zuckerberg prepares for the 2021 congressional hearing in the film, sitting on a stage behind a desk and rehearsing answers with his team, a venture capitalist named Charlie emerges from the shadows. Charlie, played by comedian Bill Burr, provides feedback to Zuckerberg and urges him to tone down political ads. Movie-Zuckerberg says he’s angry with Charlie after he wrote a scathing opinion piece and reminds him that he increased his investment 100-fold, which would have been worth more than $1 billion if he had held his position.

Charlie is inspired by real-life Facebook investor turned critic Roger McNamee, executive producer of the film. McNamee published an opinion article in The guardian in 2017, accusing Facebook and Google of “threatening public health – and democracy”, and in 2019 he published the book Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook disaster. Sorkin said Vanity Fair that although McNamee was game to portray in the film, “it was made clear” that “there might be an issue with Facebook” in the film’s depiction of the conversation between VC’s character and Zuckerberg. The character therefore became a fictionalized version inspired by McNamee.

Facebook’s civic integrity team has been ‘absorbed’

In the film, Haugen appears dejected when she realizes that the civic integrity team she works on — which worked on global election risks, including misinformation — will likely be disbanded and she will be reassigned. A Facebook executive assures the team that even if this were to happen, the work would be “absorbed” by other teams, and that would only benefit their work.

This reflects how the company communicated the change in structure following the 2020 US election. In his 2021 “60 Minutes” interview, Haugen said: “When they got rid of Civic Integrity, that’s when I was like, ‘I don’t think they’re really willing to invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being…’