Frances Haugen says a thriller could prompt more whistleblowers to act

The Social Reckoning is a Frances Haugen whistleblower movie written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. It draws partly on the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series by reporter Jeff Horwitz, built on tens of thousands of internal documents Haugen took in 2021. They suggested the company put engagement ahead of protecting users.

Mikey Madison, who won the Best Actress Oscar for the 2024 film Anora, plays a character named after Haugen. Jeremy Allen White plays Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg as a cold, robotic boss who is tired of being criticized over content moderation and fact-checking and brushes off staff warnings that design changes will stir up anger.

Haugen, a data engineer on Facebook’s civic integrity team, photographed screens of internal material before leaving. She later came forward publicly and testified before the US Senate. Sorkin’s team read her 2023 memoir, The Power of One, and had to work out how to make photographing a screen feel gripping on film.

Haugen wants the film to make whistleblowing feel human, and to remind people how wide-ranging her disclosures were. She is glad the fictional version of her is different from the real one, because that makes it easier for viewers to picture themselves in the role.

Her main target audience is people at the companies building advanced AI. If someone at one of those labs is unlucky enough to find something the public needs to know, she hopes they’ll recognize themselves in Madison’s character and feel a duty to their fellow citizens to act.

She also has a message for Meta’s CEO. Haugen says she hopes Zuckerberg watches the film and has the same gut reaction she did about the wrist warmers, a moment of asking whether he wants to keep living that way. She suggested he may have learned not to see how distorted his world has become, and that the film could at least give him a chance to choose differently.

Not everyone in the Haugen family was thrilled with every choice. Haugen, who is 42 and blonde, joked that her mother was very upset the filmmakers cast a brunette, insisting blonde people can be smart too. Her mother also felt the character was typecast as a classic nerd.

Madison has said she plays Sorkin’s version of Haugen rather than a copy. Sorkin didn’t ask her to change her look, and she read Haugen’s memoir to prepare. Haugen herself says she is very happy with how the movie turned out and calls it a personal growth moment.

The wrist and ankle warmers in the film are real. Haugen has a vasospastic disorder that restricts blood flow when the temperature drops below roughly 83 degrees, and she was wearing them when she first saw the film in a theater.

The most concrete result of Haugen’s documents was evidence in lawsuits claiming Meta harmed young users, which ended in a $17 billion settlement earlier this year. But child safety wasn’t what drove her. Documents about Instagram and teens were among the last she gathered, because she feared that browsing outside her own area would raise alarms.

Haugen says only about 10 percent of what she leaked concerned kids. Other findings, such as how the algorithm steered people toward extremist groups and how some high-profile users got special moderation treatment, have largely faded from public memory.

Meta declined to comment on the film. It has previously said the documents were cherry-picked and flattened hard decisions made amid difficult tradeoffs.

Haugen says she is not against social media, and she doesn’t think banning kids from it should be the first line of defense. But she argues Facebook only improves child safety when it is scared, and she credits Australia’s youth social media ban with pushing Meta to add basic protections it should have had already.

For parents in the US, UK and Canada, the practical takeaway is to check the safety settings on teens’ accounts and not assume the defaults protect them. On AI, Haugen is more hopeful: she says public debate about regulating it is already much further along than it was at the same stage of social media.