Jeff Horwitz

No.

Tired of being unheard, she leaks some stats to investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White.

Mm-hmm.

And as Francis uncovers more, she faces a moral dilemma about her beliefs in the company versus societal responsibilities versus her own career trajectory.

Um, but, um, but show up and run with it, you know? Um, there's no handcuffs here."

Yeah, I would think, exactly, Jeff Horwitz is very well-known with an investigative journalist for certain-

Yeah

...

but it's not like you're gonna go up and hit a clam while you're doing Highway Patrolman and then everyone's like, "You got Jeff Horwitz wrong."

Exactly.

Exactly.

Okay.

I'm curious to see how y'all are gonna feel about this one-sentence summary, because I read it before we hopped on and I went, "I would rearrange this summary a little bit." Okay, so the summary is: "Follows Frances Hagen, a young Facebook engineer who enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to blow the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets."

Ah.

I don't remember her enlisting his help.

Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for scripting The Social Network, returns to exploring the sins of Facebook with The Social Reckoning, a sequel companion piece to that David Fincher-directed 2010 film that feels late to its own party.

The Sorkin-directed film chronicles how Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White, collaborated with Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, to reveal the social media company's dirtiest laundry in the 2021 multi-article series The Facebook Files.

Thanks to the information and documents that Frances leaked to Jeff, the Journal claimed to expose how the platforms owned by mogul Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jeremy Strong, stepping in for Jesse Eisenberg, knowingly made life shittier for everybody so they could stay profitable.

It's more complex than that, but that's the gist.

[laughs]

We find Mark Zuckerberg 12 years later and now played by Jeremy Strong as his company experiences a whistleblower leak by data engineer Francis Hagen, played by Mikey Madison, who feeds information on Facebook's algorithmic changes, their consequences and Facebook leadership's indifference to those consequences to Jeff Horwitz of The Wall Street Journal played here by Jeremy Allen White.

Co-stars include Bill Burr and Wunmi Mosaku as Zuck's advisors who are coaching him through a rehearsal of an impending Senate hearing and Bill Magnussen as Facebook media fixer Teddy.

[dramatic music] Do you have an interest in social media? Not even a little bit.

It's, it's odd.

Uh, he, he n- he intersects like once with Madison but she's basically just like a background character to the meeting where they're sharing the same space and he never meets with, with White.

Uh, his period on the timeline is also completely out of sync with the thread that they were following in terms of the Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison scenes, uh, J- Jeff Horwitz and, uh, Hats- Hatsen are like occurring in 2019, 2020.

Uh, the paper, like the first article gets published in I think late 2020 and then the Facebook files get released in 2021 and-

Haugen.

And Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeff Horowitz or Horwitz.

In 2019, data engineer Francis Haugen joins Facebook's Civic Integrity team.

She believes in Facebook's mission of connecting people, but soon finds that leadership is putting engagement and revenue ahead of user safety.

She ends up working with Horwitz, and the film follows their meetings starting in December 2020 and her reluc- reluctance to go public.

Yep.

This movie has-

Mm-hmm

The many, um, lawsuits and litigations and, and studies and things like that that have called out the effects of social media.

And this really, uh, centers most directly around a whistleblower named Frances Haugen, who, uh, worked with a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jeff Horwitz to blow the whistle on all sorts of things that Facebook knew about, covered up, and were subsequently, uh, revealed in sort of like this expose.

So that is really the, the meat and potatoes in it.

If you've watched the trailer, you know that Mark Zuckerberg also plays a role in this movie.

And they sort of tried to, I guess in this one have, uh, you know, there's a, there's a balance between two characters.

You're kind of getting the perspective of Mikey Madison's character, Francis.

You're also getting the kind of pull, the push-pull relationship between that character and, uh, the Jeff Horwitz character played by Jeremy Allen White.

But in that first movie, The Social Network, um, it's all about the characters and it's all about the journey that it goes on, and the whole point of that movie is that it's to show you like this is how, you know, Facebook came to be, and, and how does that make you feel? You know, that was something that a lot of people didn't know intimately, and it was details that only people who were really close to it knew a ton about, and it was something that Sorkin and Fincher felt was important to bring to life to show like- Here's w- the guy who's running this massively influential company, and we've seen this, like, play out with tech CEOs [laughs] over the years having issues.

[laughs]

Some other big names in the film as well, uh, Mickey Madison, who plays Francis, and also Jeremy Allen White, who's, uh, Jeff Horwitz.

Um, how do these two characters slot in, and, uh, how did they, how did their roles play out, and, uh, what did you think about the acting?

Well, I thought they were really good.