Watching The Social Reckoning felt personal: here’s why

Five years ago this month, I walked to work with Frances Haugen’s voice in my ears. She was describing what she had experienced inside Facebook’s Civil Integrity Team, and more than once my eyes welled up. It was sheer heroism. 

By the time I sat down in my tiny San Francisco office, which I rented because we were all still working from home after the height of the pandemic, I couldn’t look away. I watched online until the hearing ended, almost four hours later, and I felt the earth had moved. That was October 5, 2021. (The full testimony is here.) 

When I saw The Social Reckoning the day it was released, it took me right back to that morning. That day changed social media history. It also changed my career. Everything I had been doing came tumbling down, ready for rebuilding.

Hundreds if not thousands of activists around the world read through “The Facebook Files” and saw years of their work suddenly validated.

— Frances Haugen, The Power of One

That was me.

Sixteen years of impact

For more than 16 years, I had been providing media literacy training for tween and teen girls, and for many of those years, I was trying to get funders to catch on. Non-educators didn’t think social media was a problem yet. It was “something the kids were doing.” I had reached 10,000 tweens and teens, encouraging them to question their media messages — Facebook and Instagram posts included — to improve their mental health. It made a difference, and I loved what I was able to do for them.

Then Frances Haugen spoke.

The ground cracked

The ground cracked beneath my feet. She struck me as intelligent, poised, and clear about her story and the changes she wanted, with transparent algorithms at the top of the list. She was the epitome of who we hope our girls will become. The Social Reckoning portrays the questions she wrestled with before blowing the whistle, and I felt for her deeply, then and now.

And she had documents. Her evidence fueled Jeff Horwitz’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal‘s The Facebook Files, and we all thought: Finally, everyone will know what Facebook intended, and what they had wrought.

I believe these systems should change. Even more, I believe we have to help the kids affected right now, not sit back helplessly and wait. We can’t always wait for the evidence to be airtight, either. So I went for it. 

Soon after Haugen’s testimony and the declaration of the adolescent mental health crisis, I started working on a solution that could build on my successful media literacy work with girls.

But what I was doing in classrooms wasn’t going to be nearly enough to stop the pain Facebook was causing. I hit the brakes and took a sharp left.

Just a girl from Silicon Valley

Before I tell you what I built, I should tell you why this moment propelled me forward. It was personal.

I was born and raised a mile from the future Facebook campus, bathed in Silicon Valley’s attitudes of the self-made man (and woman, sometimes). Reveling in CEOs’ huge net worths and amazing shareholder returns was the stuff of conversation in coffee shops, from my friends’ parents, from my high school classmates. My mother worked at two of the large tech companies as I was growing up and the major venture capital firms were up the street. Between us, we had very mixed feelings about Steve Jobs yet were amazed by the Macintosh in our living room.

I believed tech could change the world in great ways, à la Steve Jobs. 

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. 

— Steve Jobs, Rolling Stone, 1994

Mark Zuckerberg talks about “making the world a better place.” Into what, though? That is certainly not what’s happening now with Meta. Somewhere along the way, the promise of connecting the world became a business built around keeping eyeballs on the screen. 

Facebook started five years after I graduated from college and moved to San Francisco, where I was a tech editor, as the dot-com boom and bust surrounded me. People come here to make their fortunes, from the Gold Rush to today’s tech-worker influx. Zuckerberg was no different. This is where the money was (and is).

Is Mark Zuckerberg the evil one?

Zuckerberg may not be the root of all evil. But The Social Reckoning is a cautionary tale about the greed that puts “profits over safety,” as Frances Haugen said, and what happens when one person has outsized power. He cannot be fired from Meta, so what he says goes.

People around here understand that when I say “no,” that’s the end of the debate. 

— Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning

Just three weeks after Haugen’s testimony, I saw Zuckerberg and his wife having dinner at a well-known, old-school restaurant in Palo Alto. They appeared to be hiding, facing the fireplace so no one could easily see their faces. My husband, a creative copywriter, was spit-balling the perfect words to say to him. We didn’t engage, at my mother’s urging: It was her birthday dinner, after all. But I was absolutely furious, staring at a man going about his evening after he had allowed and fomented political mayhem and damage to girls’ self-esteem.

In The Social Reckoning, Jeremy Strong plays him masterfully: robotic and wooden, just as he has appeared in Congress and in interviews. The trainer preparing him to testify advises, “Don’t say ‘users,’ say ‘people.’ Don’t say ‘humans.’” The film’s Zuckerberg lives outside the realm of morality, and that’s alarming given how much power he has.

Frances Haugen recently told BBC’s The Interface podcast that she thinks The Social Reckoning isn’t about Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg but about the larger tech ecosystem, where secrets are kept and humanity is diminished. That sounds right to me. As she wrote in her 2023 book The Power of One: “Facebook is a for-profit company that had the opportunity to operate in the dark, and when offered the chance to cut a few corners, it cut them all.”

But it’s bigger than Meta now

This isn’t really about Meta, but Meta is the largest and the first. Its addictive design influenced the rest, so as Meta goes, so do the others. Look at the recent $17 billion settlement: Zuckerberg said he’d make platform feature changes related to mental health if TikTok, Snap, and the others did too. He knows he’s the leader of the pack.

The Social Reckoning doesn’t let this go, and neither will I: Meta is dangerous, about as dangerous as cars before seat belt laws, safety regulations, driver training, child car seats, and licensing with enforceable age limits. All of these platforms are dangerous to our children’s minds and hearts.

The Social Network struck me as a wonky, overdramatized origin story. The Social Reckoning is real for all of us. Meta’s behavior infects our lives every day, even if you’ve never used social media. Its choices deserve at least as much attention as the current conversation about AI being an existential threat to humanity, and Meta is trying to get in the AI game, too.

What do we do now?

We cannot keep asking children to navigate systems designed by some of the most sophisticated technology companies in the world — and then expect them to protect themselves through willpower alone.

We also can’t sit around waiting for Meta and its ilk to change because of settlements and fines. It’s not happening, except by force: regulators and the repeal of Section 230. Most of today’s 12-year-olds will be in their mid-20s by the time regulation arrives, and this is a $1.9 trillion company that can fight as long as it needs to in order to stay unregulated. Sounds a lot like Philip Morris and the other tobacco companies, doesn’t it? 

But we can reduce the harm. Kids need training for this wild new world, not for us to resist and delay and ban it all, as much as we’d perhaps like to. It’s just not realistic. They need something like a driver’s license, except for social media.

So I started a new nonprofit iteration, Ready Set Screen. As with my classroom work, the program I created, the Social Media Driver’s License, helps kids develop a consciousness about their media, so they can look after themselves from the inside rather than be victims waiting to be rescued. This time, the learning can break out of local classrooms and be provided in homes nationwide. Kids will use these platforms no matter what changes, and we have no time to wait. 

Parents shouldn’t have to make up for what these platforms are doing. They want to be educated so they can support their kids, so I also made a parent course, in the hope that parents and kids can break down the walls built by arguments and fierce insistence on independence.

I believe looking our times’ Goliath in the face and finding a way to lessen his harm is how we take him down. Disarm social media’s weaponry, and support kids as they find their own balance and learn to understand their own needs and behavior. We can be there with them.

The technology companies have had years to understand what they’re building. Our kids deserve the same opportunity to understand what they’re using.

The Social Reckoning moved me almost as much as Frances Haugen’s testimony and the beauty of the truth finally seeing the light. I saw the light too — I saw a way forward.

Jennifer Berger is the Executive Director of Ready Set Screen.

Sources

Haugen, Frances. The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook, 2023.

Rolling Stone Steve Jobs interview, 1994

The Social Reckoning, 2026

BBC’s The Interface podcast, October 7, 2026