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In 2010, Time magazine’s Person of the Year was not a world leader or entertainment icon but Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-six-year-old creator of Facebook. That same year, Zuckerberg got the Hollywood treatment in the bio-pic “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz revisit “The Social Network,” which put forward an origin story for the company, captivating audiences and becoming a cultural touchpoint in the process. They compare it to Sorkin’s new film, “The Social Reckoning,” which dramatizes whistle-blowing by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen and the resulting bombshell investigation conducted by the Wall Street Journal in 2021. In the earlier film, Jesse Eisenberg played Zuckerberg as a lonely, ambitious genius—a stark contrast to Jeremy Strong’s portrayal, in “The Social Reckoning,” of a man who puts profits before people at every turn. At its best, the new film functions as its own form of whistle-blowing. “The best reason to watch ‘The Social Reckoning’ is that a lot of people still don’t understand some of these things about this company,” Cunningham says. “I do wonder if a kind of news-giving or news-bringing, however belated . . . is a salutary effect of these portrayals.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“The Social Network” (2010)
“The Social Reckoning” (2026)
“The Facebook Files” (The Wall Street Journal)
“Succession” (2018-23)
“Aaron Sorkin Made a Movie About Her. She Just Hopes Mark Zuckerberg Watches,” by Seija Rankin (The Hollywood Reporter)
“As Big Tech Takes Over Hollywood, the Picture Onscreen Gets Darker,” by Alissa Wilkinson (The New York Times)
“Silicon Valley” (2014-19)
“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams
“Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech,” by Claire Stapleton
“Edward Snowden and the Rise of Whistle-Blower Culture,” by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker)
“Data center opposition a rare issue uniting Americans across the political divide” (“60 Minutes”)
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.
