Aaron Sorkin and Jeremy Strong on Zuckerberg’s Power and Facebook’s “Reckoning”

Jeremy Strong (0:00)

The ambient takeaway for me of this movie is about truth decay. It's about the erosion of the very concept of truth, and it's about the deterioration of civil discourse in our society, and the diminishing reliance on facts and truth. And has Facebook had a large part in that? Absolutely.

Kara Swisher (0:30)

Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher.

Sixteen years after writing The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin is back with a new film about the company formerly known as Facebook. The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, focuses on Frances Haugen, a data scientist and former Facebook product manager who leaked troves of damning internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. The result was a 17-part investigation published by the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2021 It revealed that Facebook knew, quote, in acute detail that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm often in ways only the company fully understands, and that, quote, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposes, the company didn't fix them.

The investigation and Haugen's subsequent whistleblower testimony revealed, among other things, that Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018 to prioritize what it called meaningful social interaction, which ultimately encouraged polarization and the spread of misinformation. It showed the company was also aware of the negative effects its Instagram platform has on teen mental health. Facebook said at the time the stories contained, quote, deliberate mischaracterizations of what we're trying to do. It also changed its name to Metta roughly six weeks later.

The Social Reckoning is in theaters now. The film stars Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Today, I'm talking with Aaron Sorkin and Jeremy Strong. Sorkin is the award-winning creator and writer of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, which is currently being revived on Broadway. He won an Oscar for writing the Social Network, and Strong has an Emmy and a Golden Globe, among other awards for playing Kendall Roy on HBO's Succession. I wanted to talk to them because I've lived this, and one of the things that was really interesting is that Jeff and Frances brought the receipts to something a lot of us had been saying in the years before that this site was dangerous. And Jeff's reporting and Frances's whistleblowing created a situation where we understood what we thought was happening was in fact happening. And I do believe the company had known about it for a long time and didn't want to take responsibility, something I've talked about a lot. There's also a number of other things coming out, the Musk documentary, the movie Artificial on Open AI. And it's all sort of looking at these characters who are damaging society in significant ways and what that means for the rest of us and why we allow it. Our expert question today comes from sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her latest book is called Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. So stick around.

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