Before Frances Haugen released her 2023 memoir The Power of One, detailing her experience blowing the whistle on Facebook and its failures to protect users from its harmful algorithms, she got a call from Aaron Sorkin. The Social Network director was starting to think about doing another project exploring social media and wanted to pick her brain.
“My immediate question was, how do you crystallize the amount of information that is going into a 400-page, very dense, book until it’s interesting enough for a movie?” recalls Haugen. “There was no way I was going to be able to give him enough context in a two-hour meeting in order for him to feel confident there was a story.”
Then, her book hit shelves (it’s now out in paperback), revealing to the world how her background and early career — growing up in Iowa, becoming one of the few women working at Google during its ascent — allowed her to become the only employee at Facebook willing to speak out about the company’s harmful practices. Sorkin called again. This time, he showed up to their meeting with a copy of her book heavily highlighted and underline. Haugen had also recently watched his Lucille Ball biopic Being the Ricardos and was impressed by the way he treated the complicated interpersonal dynamics: “Not everyone can write smart women, and certainly not all men.” Sorkin then optioned her memoir, and began work on The Social Reckoning.
In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, Haugen gives her thoughts on the film.
First, let’s do a little refresher on why Facebook was able to hide the fact that their algorithms and products are harmful to people…
The way I always framed it for people was, this is not about social media, it’s about our economy changing. We govern companies based on the factory era, on the mindset that everyone is getting the exact same widget — if there’s lead paint on mine, all the widgets have lead paint. With social media, everyone gets a different product and Meta can brush everything off as that person’s outlier experience. Now with AI chat models and super-intelligence, we’re having these same conversations around how to govern algorithmic products. We’ve got places like Anthropic saying, hey we need to embed independent researchers with full access inside these companies.
Your story has come out in a few waves — with your whistleblowing in the Journal, you went on 60 Minutes, then you wrote the book. How do you see the movie fitting in to this, or does it feel wholly separate since it’s Aaron Sorkin’s project?
When I came forward initially, I didn’t expect anyone to do anything. It’s a structural problem, with each Congress passing fewer and fewer bills. Modern constitutional scholars don’t recommend our vintage Constitution to anyone, and we are currently living with the consequences of that. So there were a couple of years where it was really up in the air whether any change would happen in the United States. With the movie coming out it feels like the culture is now caught up. In history, there are things that are leading indicators and things that are lagging indicators — people who read the Wall Street Journal and people who watch movies.
That begs the question of how many people will go see this movie who have not heard of you or what you revealed about Facebook?
And that’s why movies matter. I think if people can emotionally connect to this story then they can intellectually connect. The more ways we can imagine different futures, the more people feel permission to demand better futures.
Do you think tech employees will watch The Social Reckoning and then decide to blow the whistle themselves?
Think of all the people who watched Eat Pray Love and went and traveled for the first time. I do hope there are people on the inside who say, “Hey I see myself in that internal conflict. I too am witnessing things I can’t accept.“ It’s funny, until I watched it I had totally forgotten that Jeff [played by Jeremy Allen White] and I were totally lost for a period of time. There were things I had hunches about, but just had to find the right document, things like that. I think it’s good they didn’t make Frances Haugen the character too all-knowing, because it shows that you don’t have to have everything perfectly.
Before you saw the film for the first time, were you worried about anything?
I was nervous because, no offense to Hollywood, there are a lot of tech movies that don’t do the tech right. There’s the hologram board or whatever it is, and you’re like yeah, that’s not how the Internet works. I was expecting more moments where I would cringe, but the things that made me cringe were not technical.
What made you cringe?
Mark Zuckerberg‘s office more than anything. They made a good rich multi-billionaire office, with a giant bank of windows and the big desk and the great view. And this is kind of sad, but Mark would never sit in an office like that because a window that big is a security threat. He has bulletproof glass around him. He sits in the center of a quarter-mile-long building because he’s so scared. He buys all of his neighbor’s houses so that there’s a buffer. That man is a prisoner of his own decisions.
Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) in The Social Reckoning.
Sony Pictures
Given what you know about how Meta operates, were you worried about the moving being able to make it to the screen?
Oh, yeah. Meta made $200 billion in profit last year. If they showed up and said, here’s $1 billion for the movie to go away, would Sony do that? Even if this movie is wildly successful, would Sony really walk away from that? I’m grateful that [Meta] did not take the litigious or underhanded route. But anything can happen. To give you a sense, right now I’m trying to rent a theater here in Puerto Rico so that I can invite everyone I know and they can ask me whatever they want afterwards. I really don’t want to have to discuss this movie at every cocktail party for the next two years, so I want to just rip the Band-Aid off. But I contacted the local theater and they told me they don’t know if it’s going to be distributed in Puerto Rico.
What do you think you’ll get asked about the most?
Well, in Puerto Rico there’s a tiny historical discrepancy. People took Covid really, really seriously here and locked down really hard, but in the movie they make it look way more fun. So I’m sure I will hear people complain about that. One of the places where Jeff and I worked on the story was this cheap Airbnb that looked out right onto the water and we would see manatees as we worked. When they recreated Puerto Rico in Vancouver, they didn’t have manatees, so they didn’t make it into the movie.
People might want to know if Jeff was as much of a doofus in real life, because in the movie they have to make him seem like he’s incompetent. He’s the audience surrogate. In reality, I chose to work with Jeff because he was one of the most with-it tech reporters on the beat and he cared about how Facebook was hurting people in the more overlooked places in the world. But [in the movie] they have to have him asking certain questions so that Mikey can answer them for the audience.
Did you meet with Mikey Madison, who plays you, before they made the movie?
I didn’t. She was extremely busy that year because she’d won the Oscar just a few months before.
In the new trailer they released, there’s a bit about how the Journal is worried they’re going to ruin your life. Did that ring true at all?
I never feared Facebook coming after me, because at that point they had never sued anyone. I weighed the career risks. The thing about being good at data science and algorithms and AI is that even if you eliminated 90 percent of the jobs you still have one. If I wanted to go work at Anthropic I’m pretty sure I could go work there. I also think I was charitable to the people at Facebook. It’s not like there were evil people that did these things, they existed in a system of incentives that made it more likely that people would do very bad things. I don’t think I’ve closed doors that I regret closing. This movie will pass along into the pop culture ether, and this phase of my life will have end caps.
Do you think Mark is going to watch The Social Reckoning?
When I sat there for two hours and watched it, I was like, “Wow this [story] is a thing that has really impacted the course of my life, and I have done a wonderful job of being in denial about that.“ I hope if Mark watches the movie, he has the same experience. That he has to sit there and be like, “Wow.“ I was really grateful that Aaron put the words into Mark‘s mouth of saying, “My kids have to read these things.“ Now the oldest is 10, maybe 11, and they’re going to leave the homeschool pod eventually. They’re going to see their father out in the world. He should be reminded that, hey, you are making choices. You don’t have to be the head of Meta forever. You don’t have to play this role in society.
