Aaron Sorkin Accidentally Made Mark Zuckerberg the Hero of His Anti-Facebook Movie

In the latest trailer for The Social Reckoning, the Zuck character stridently rebuts pro-censorship arguments.

I was not expecting that I would enjoy The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's upcoming film about how evil Facebook is. It's a sequel of sorts to The Social Network (2010)—an enjoyable but flawed and unfair portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—and focuses on the so-called Facebook Papers, which most people barely remember, but involved whistleblower Frances Haugen publicly revealing that the company knew its social media products were harming some users (mostly teenage girls on Instagram). At the time of this news cycle, I deemed it a "big fat nothingburger," given the weakness of the evidence.

Sorkin—whose own politics seem to fall mostly in line with the sort of overly idealistic, bland do-something liberalism that typified The West Wing, his best known piece of entertainment—is a passionate detractor of Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2019, Sorkin went so far as to write an open letter to Zuckerberg (in the form of a column for The New York Times, of course), in which he accused Facebook of "assaulting the truth." Over the course of the last two decades, from Network to Reckoning, Sorkin's nuanced but mostly negative representation of social media and its impact on society has yielded to Jonathan Haidt-esque blind hatred; his forthcoming depiction of Zuckerberg (now portrayed by Jeremy Strong rather than Jesse Eisenberg) is intended as one-dimensional cartoon villainy.

Well, so much for those intentions. This certainly isn't what Sorkin intended, but I found myself cheering Strong's Zuckerberg in a recently released scene from the movie, in which the Facebook CEO marshals free speech arguments to rebut the histrionic apprehensions of Bill Burr's character.

"I'm not the one who's lying and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is…"

The Social Reckoning, a companion piece to The Social Network, is coming exclusively to theatres October 9. https://t.co/9BRuwifGIt pic.twitter.com/3nR1PhZUXC

— The Social Reckoning Movie (@TheSocialMovie) September 23, 2026

Yeah, what Zuckerberg said.

We don't want the platform itself to be overly involved in deciding what is true and what is not, for the simple reason that this hasn't worked very well in practice. There was a time when Facebook took dramatic steps to correct alleged wrongthink, empowering ostensibly independent (but in practice, extremely progressive) fact-checkers to police the site; this was a disaster that frequently resulted in legitimate political speech facing sanction.

Sorkin may not like it, but his side has lost this argument, and today the social media companies are less likely than ever to engage in heavy-handed moderation of political content. They trust the users to decide for themselves, for exactly the reasons Strong's Zuckerberg lays out there. I take it that Sorkin thinks this is the villain's perspective, but he may be surprised how many moviegoers disagree.

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This Week on Free Media

I am once again joined by Amber Duke to talk about that much-discussed Nikole Hannah-Jones article on her daughter's experience in New York City public schools.

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Worth Watching

I also appeared on two podcasts that might be of interest to newsletter readers. First, I joined Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression to go over my evolution from campus free speech beat reporter to television commentator, the Trump administration's record on the First Amendment, and other topics. Then I reappeared alongside my former Rising cohost Briahna Joy Gray and spoke with Al Jazeera about third parties in America.