Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is in theaters, with Mikey Madison as the whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Its case, as RogerEbert.com puts it, is that Facebook’s algorithms steered users rightward and that “the January 6 riots are the end product of the machinations the movie lays out.”
Writing in UnHerd, Matt Feeney says the film has the wrong villain. The scandal was never mainly about content. It was about design. Platforms were engineered to be habit-forming, drawing on the behavioral-design playbook of Nir Eyal’s Hooked and the variable reward schedule, and everything users produce becomes training data for machines.
Liberals missed this, he argues, because they mistook the platforms for instruments of liberation. “Idealizing social media platforms as tools of emancipatory expression was always naïve.” His verdict on the movie is brutal: “The film is a publicity coup for its ostensible villain, Mark Zuckerberg.”
Content is not a distraction from the business model. It is the business model. The engagement machine Feeney describes has to be fed something, and what it learned to feed us was outrage, because outrage holds attention better than agreement does. Design and content are the same problem seen from two angles.
The practical case cuts the same way. “Extraction” is an abstraction with no remedy attached, while content decisions are things a company can actually change, a regulator can actually audit, and a whistleblower can actually document. Haugen brought out the internal research. Nobody can subpoena a dopamine loop.
And Feeney grants more than he means to. He calls the harm to teenagers’ mental health “appalling,” credits Haugen for proposing algorithmic fixes, and concedes Trump bears primary responsibility for January 6. Those are the content critics’ own points, conceded and then set aside.
Feeney is right about the movie and wrong about the remedy. A film in which the worst charge against a man is that his product made people vote badly is, as he says, a gift to that man. It flatters the audience, hands the problem to a content-moderation department, and lets everyone go home.
But “extractive, not extremist” is a false choice. Extraction is the engine; extremism is the exhaust. A machine built to hold attention at any cost will find that fury holds it best, and will serve fury without anyone deciding to. That is worse than a conspiracy, not better, because there is no one to subpoena.
The real force of Feeney’s essay is a shift in the question. Ask not what the platforms are doing to our politics but what they are doing to our capacity to attend to anything at all. Every hour of scrolling is an hour the machine learns from and the reader does not. A citizenry can recover from believing false things. It is harder to recover from losing the ability to sit with a true thing long enough to understand it.
Check your screen time, then ask what you would have done with those hours in 2006. Which answer bothers you more?
Read the originals: Matt Feeney, “What liberals get wrong about social media,” UnHerd, Oct. 18, 2026 · Matt Zoller Seitz on The Social Reckoning, RogerEbert.com, Oct. 7, 2026.
