On with Kara Swisher - Aaron Sorkin and Jeremy Strong on Zuckerberg’s Power and Facebook’s “Reckoning”

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Sixteen years after “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin is back with “The Social Reckoning,” a new film he wrote and directed. It focuses on whistleblower Frances Haugen, a data scientist and former Facebook product manager who leaked troves of damning internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, leading to a 17-part investigation in the fall of 2021.  Kara sits down with Sorkin and lead actor Jeremy Strong, who plays Mark Zuckerberg. Sorkin talks about what made him return to Facebook and why the January 6th insurrection is pivotal to the story. And Strong explains why he approached Zuckerberg with a "radical amount" of empathy, and why he sees him as idealistic but "misguided and myopic."  “The Social Reckoning” is in theaters now. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. 16 years after writing the social network,

Aaron Sorkin is back with a new film about the Fox Media. company formerly known as Facebook. The social reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, focuses on Francis Howgan, 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 exposés, the company didn't fix them. The investigation in Hogan'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 meta, roughly six weeks later. The Social Reckoning is in theaters now. The film stars Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, Mikey Madison as Francis Howgan, 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 gold Globe, among other awards, for playing Kendall Roy on HBO's succession. I wanted to talk to them because, you know, I've lived this. And one of the things that was really interesting is that Jeff and Francis 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 Francis's whistleblowing created a situation when 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 OpenAI. 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 sociologists 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. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane.

We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, taking his dog to therapy, and winning an Emmy for only murders in the building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. How much have you spent on your pet's medical care this year? Maybe more than your own? 25 years ago, it was very rare to hear of a pet having an MRI. Now it's kind of standard if a pet presents with an issue.

Big corporations and private equity have seen all of this and have rushed into the sector. Why your vet bill is so high, that's this week on Explain It Me. Listen to new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Aaron and Jeremy, thanks for coming on on. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Kara. It's great to be here. So I really like the movie.

I obviously lived part of it and I've been living it for far too long. But I want to start with a clip of Mark Zuckerberg from an interview I did with him in 2018. I asked him how he felt about the fact that some were blaming Facebook for inciting violence that led to the deaths of thousands of people in Myanmar. this was part of his response. Look, I want to make sure that our products are used for good. At the end of the day, I mean, other people blaming us or not is actually not the thing that matters to me. What matters to me is how are people using our services and are we acting as the force for good that I know we can and have a responsibility to? And it's not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is going to be good.

I mean, this is humanity, right? People use tools for good and bad. But I think that we have a clear responsibility to make a make sense. sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad. So I think he was not telling me the truth then, and I since have given him a hard time and many other interviews. But in light of the revelations from the Wall Street Journal's Facebook files, what's your reaction to Mark here? And is this perspective or reflector or not in the character you created? Aaron, you go first and then Jeremy. Well, I'll just give one example, the one that we

dramatized in the film. Why the switch to MSI, knowing that the things that we reshare the most are things that make you angry, knowing what kind of content he's going to be shooting at people. Jeremy? Well, you know, my reaction to it is kind of refracted through my work on this movie. And of course, you know, part of my job in kind of creating a longitudinal record of Mark's evolution was spending a lot of time with your interviews. You know, you're sort of the the Frost Nixon or the Kissinger ones, you know, with Mark, and the person who most held his feet to the fire and who most held him accountable

for the ways that he was handling and mishandling his responsibilities. But I think in one of those interviews, you said there's an expression in journalism. If your mother says, I love you, check it. So I do believe that he means what he's saying in that interview, and part of my job maybe is, to believe it. But I also think you called him at one point the most earnest of the leaders in tech. So I hear that and I hear someone with an intention that these tools will be used for the good

and who just was wrong, an intentional person and unintended consequences at scale. That's a really good way of putting it. And one of the things is sometimes you can be willfully ignorant. And that's where I sort of came down initially. And then I think he knew. That's fair. Right. And I think one of the things I had said, and it's a very clear through line through this, I said it in my book, that enragement equals engagement, which is something I've been saying for decades. Like, you have to understand the way they changed everything, made it so enragement was the pull. And I think he fully understood that, but didn't want to take responsibility. And I think that really shows throughout this movie is the lack of feeling that it's his fault. But, Aaron, you said you were reluctant to make the sequel to the social network. Talk a little about. about that because it accelerated. I mean, I think you left the last movie on a sense that this could go the wrong way, and then it just did. Kara, I honestly never felt like I was making the sequel to the social network.

Honestly, what I call it is it's a movie about Facebook, written by the writer who wrote The Social Network. One of the characters from the Social Network is in the Social Reckoning, as if Henry Hill from Goodfellas showed up as a character in Casino. There's a moment in... I'm going to answer your question a second, but I want to go back to your first question. There's a moment in the movie

when Wimimim Asaku's character poses a question to Jeremy's Mark Zuckerberg that goes unanswered. Mark says, we're a bulletin board. We don't control what people pin to it. And Wemie says, but you can, right? And there's no answer. Mark ends the debate.

Why isn't it important that Mark allows extremist groups to pin things to his bulletin board. Yeah, well, that's, that, that was the debate we had in one interview over anti-Semitism and Holocaust deniers, where he said, Holocaust deniers don't mean to lie, which I thought was the biggest tell. I was like, oh, they kind of do. That's their job. Of course they do. I'll tell you who definitely means to lie, election deniers. That's correct. And so, you know, I think, Jeremy, you've done a very good job of depicting that, but you told Aaron that you'd be interested in playing the role of Mark Zuckerberg, if Jesse Eisenberg, who played him in the first film, turned it down.

He thought he had glamorized him. But what attracted him playing to someone who was pretty much still reviled? I mean, Elon gave him a respite for a minute, but he still seems to be attracting the same kind of dislike. And throughout his career, I would say, what do you want people to take away

from your interpretation of Mark? Well, I'm going to parse that slightly. I mean, the first and the main reason is Aaron Sorkin. Aaron is the greatest writer alive. And, you know, Shakespeare said our job as the players is to hold a mirror up to nature and to show the age and body of the time. It's very form and pressure. And that's what Aaron has done for all of us in our culture in an unparalleled, incomparable way. So, you know, for me in my life, the moments that I most felt like I was making contact with the sort of galaxy of my dreams

were the moment that Steven Spielberg offered me a part in Lincoln and the moment that Aaron Sorkin wanted to meet me for Molly's game. So this is our third movie together, and so that's the main reason to do something with Aaron. I also feel, you know, Sean Penn told me once our job is to be a bodyguard for our characters. I feel in a way, and Aaron has said, you know, when you write a character, it's as if you are, Aaron, please correct me if I'm paraphrasing you, or maybe answer it for me.

Making your case to God why you should be allowed into heaven? Yeah. And so, you know, I think that doing that for complex, fallible, perhaps even reviled people is an important thing. You know, I think somebody who came to see the movie with me on Sunday night said, I brought my dad, and it was a friend of my dad's. He said, you know, when I found out that you could burn a flag in this country, it's what made me love it the most. And it's the ability to structurally have the resilience to contain extremely dissonant. points of view. And so while I might entirely disagree on a human level with a character, I think in terms of this art form, it's an important and valuable thing to embody and with conviction

and make the case for a dissonant point of view from my own. You know, this is where the seed of the movie was planted. Jeremy, I'm not arguing with the way in which you play the character, way that you're defending the character. But it was, I think, in 2019, Kara, that Facebook announced that it would no longer be fact-checking political ads, right? Right. It was in 2019, I wrote an op-ed in the Times about that decision to not fact-check political ads. And Mark surprisingly responded publicly on his Facebook page by quoting a speech of mind from the American president that defends an American's right to burn the American flag. protest. And what I thought was strange was that surely Mark, as smart as he is, no, the difference

between an unpopular opinion and a lie. I'm not asking him to not post unpopular opinions yet. I'm asking him to not post lies. Yeah, I would agree with you. I've had the same discussion with him. But one of the things that I think about a lot was whether, Jeremy, you were, in that regard, you were articulating how he feels in a very, I would say, severe way. I think that's exactly what he says. He tries now to be a little funnier about it, but he was very much in that camp of people should be able to say anything, right? And I have no responsibility for that. I'm not sure I think the latter. And listen, there's a kind of transference that happens as an actor. So I'm, there's still a, this thing has a long tail for me. But I do think that,

and I've heard you guys get into this, this idea that a private company should not be the arbiter of what is true for then 2.3 billion people. And I think the decisions to be made on the margins of content moderation, having tried to walk a mile in his shoes, are some of them very complex. And now I unequivocally condemn the points of view of the Holocaust deniers and of Alex Jones and InfoWars, and, you know, I think that it's abhorrent. And I also think if we de-platform Q&On, I'm not sure what that does

in terms of the dissonant viewpoints that I talked about. So it's just about going into these things. And Kara, I heard you once say in a conversation about VR, you know, well, yes, it allows you to see through their eyes, but does it allow you to understand their experience? experience. And that's what you talked about empathy. And that is my job in this case, is to sort of see empathically and serve Aaron's vision of the film. Did you see him as a villain, either of you? Because there's a villainous element to it. And also one of the things I always said to

people who are like, do you think he's a villain? I go, no, he's someone way over his skis on something he should not be doing. Like, he's utterly an experience and won't stop running it, essentially. I did not see him as a villain. A villain, at least in Dramedous terms, a villain, according to Aristotle, is someone whose goal is villainous. They want revenge. They want the money. In this case, what Mark wants is good, right? He wants to connect people. That's not a bad idea.

It's the fact that he's out over his skis and he's making mistakes. And I'm curious, setting aside for a moment, assigning blame. Millions upon millions of people believe things that aren't true, like an election was rigged, or a vaccine will give you autism, and refuse to believe things that are true, like the election was fair, the vaccine works, and man-made climate change is real. At a time like this, it's a terrible problem, can't Facebook help? Shouldn't they, and I'd love to see them say, okay, you know, for a few years,

we're going to take one for the team and do this. Yeah, they're not going to do that. But Jeremy, go ahead. No, I mean, listen, I think what Aaron is saying is profoundly important. And, you know, to me, 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. Now, I do not and cannot see him as a villain. I saw him as imperious. I saw him as mission-focused to the point of myopia. And I saw him as completely besieged, which he at that point absolutely was, you know, by everyone, by yours truly, you know, and fairly so. But someone who had gotten quite used to being,

attacked from all sides and who was attempting to manage that. I agree with everything, Jeremy just said. And I have to say, Jeremy just does a beautiful job of making those human moments, especially at the end of the film when he's in the war room surrounded by this... The noise of what was happening. Horrible chaos. So I agree with Jeremy. You know, it's interesting because that's the...

I mean, I texted him at that moment, too. I was like, what are you doing? You need to stop it. You need to turn it off. I'd told them to turn it off many times. You mean literally turn it off? Yeah. You were telling him to turn it off.

You mean take down Trump's post? Take down Trump, turn him off. The first post they took down an hour and 20 minutes later, which is too late. The second post they took down eight minutes later. Yes. Once they had made the decision. Once they had made the decision. And it's actually one of my favorite moments in the film, which is a human moment.

Because however much you might not like that man, Mark Zuckerberg, however much you might not like him. I do not believe that there is a nefarious intention. I believe he's a person who, for him that day, was devastating and who cares about our democracy, despite the consequences of his company on that democracy. And so that moment for a person who says, I am a free speech absolutist,

to then take down a standing president's post, is a moment of turmoil. It's a massive year. responsibility. Right. And I just reminded Jeremy, it was actually his first day of shooting that we shot it out of order and we had to shoot that scene first. Yeah, it wasn't easy. But Jeremy, preparing for the fact that we were going to be shooting it out of order, had the rest of the actors who were in that scene, read through all the scenes that led up to that. We hadn't shot. But I reminded Jeremy, it was very little I needed to remind Jeremy of, but at that moment that this is like,

if the president was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, addressing the nation on all four networks, you didn't like what he was saying, so you decided to yank the plug out of the wall. It's that big a deal. Well, if he was saying everybody get a gun and shoot everyone, you might. Right? That's the issue. It's like what, you don't want to make that decision. You don't want to make that decision.

I don't think you would do it as quickly as you would do it if I was the one saying it or if you were the one saying it. Yeah. One thing, though, they knew it was coming. I wrote a column in the New York Times in 2019, essentially predicting the inaugur... I said there's going to be an insurrection based on the stuff on Facebook and Trump's statements before the insurator... This was 2019. I said he's going to lose the election. He's going to say it's false. And he's going to call on his followers to do something about it, including an insurrection to stop the process. And when I wrote that, they immediately got a call from Facebook saying, how dare you say this about us? And I said, you know, you know, not even anticipating this happening because it looks like he's going to do this. And they were like, we think this is irresponsible. You said that. And I said, well, I think you're handmade and sedition. So I don't know. There we are. So anticipation is also part, like, he being surprised, surprised me. I'm curious. Does Facebook, does Mark share information with domestic intelligence groups? Does he say, look, here's what we're seeing on Facebook. You guys should know about it? I think sometimes, sometimes not.

Like, he's more resistant compared to other companies. It depends on the company, but he doesn't have to unless it's a court order. You know, I think they're more of the court order thing. But let me, one of the things that you touched on Jeremy here is I know, because I sat with him right when it was coming out. When the social network came out, he was very upset. I would call him near tears, actually, at a dinner we were at. And he said, I think, I said, what are you worried about? You're about to become a billionaire.

What do you care? And it's also a Hollywood movie. And he goes, well, this is what people will think about me. And this is what people will take away. And I said, no, Mark, they're going to think a lot worse in the coming days. But fine. But you said the screenplay was vetted within an inch of its life by studio lawyers. But did you have concerns about the new from, given now meta and its influence has grown

quantumly in the past 16 years? And were there details or moments in the scripts you had to fight for? First of all, I have to give credit to Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony, who from the day I turned in the script, it was full speed ahead. And he never asked me to tone anything down or can you change that person's name or something like that. There were notes from the lawyers, but nothing that hurt me at all. What made me nervous was spacing on her name, Sarah, she wrote the book. Yeah, careless people. Right.

That Facebook sought and received an injunction against her promoting the book at all. She was even sitting on a panel, right? And she simply sat there. She wasn't allowed to speak. So I thought, oh, boy, if Facebook seeks and gets an injunction, for some reason that I'm not seeing, that the lawyers aren't seeing, and just all they have to do is postpone the release of the film. Yeah.

Until after the midterms. They weren't going to do that. Not you. It would cause intense problems. Kara, you know, of course, you must understand why he would have felt that way. And I think, as you know, he's someone who has said this, that it's important to him to feel understood, if not, liked. You know, he's okay not being liked. He knows that he's not liked, but he does want to be

understood, and he feels mischaracterized in many ways. Now, one thing I think Aaron has done superbly well is sort of encompassing his point of view in a way that I felt was accurate, and it's distilled in what Aaron has written. You know, Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth, and, you know, we live in this sort of mirror, inverted mirror age where truth social is a truth that tells a lie. But this is a, Aaron has always said this about the other films we've made. It's a painting, not a photograph. So, you know, I do feel, though, a tremendous onus on me to represent this person to the world, knowing that, you know, it's a painting, not a photograph.

Yeah, exactly. So you compared the intense research you do for roles like an investigative mission. And what did that look like in that regard is you're just jumping off from this? And what was the biggest challenge for you? You have the voice down disturbingly well. I was like, oh, I haven't talked to Mark since our last interview that was a disaster for him, which is a long time ago because he doesn't want to bother with people who bother him. But what was the biggest challenge for you? All of it. I mean, all of it. Saying yes, you know, the risk involved. It was a massive amount of research and just trying to understand where he's coming from. And, you know, starting with, really starting around with your early All Things Digital interviews and the early face of Facebook New Yorker profile, you know, going all the way through. I mean, to me, the question that Aaron is sort of answering in this movie is a New Yorker. profile can Mark Zuckerberg save Facebook before it breaks democracy? You know, how much and to what extent has Facebook been implicit in the fracturing and breakage of our democracy? But again, it's it is a kind of investigation that I do inexhaustibly and try to do as thoroughly as possible so that I can earn the right to represent somebody to the world. We'll be back in a minute.

Everyone's talking about the prospect of a democratic wave in the midterm elections. But here's something that matters just as much. The battle to control state legislatures. That's the most important thing we should be focusing on right now. The GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, which means they control the governor seat, plus the state house and the state senate. For Democrats, it's 16 states. Meaning that the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports,

things like increasing minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. If Democrats flip just a handful of state legislatures, the majority of Americans will now live in the state under full Democratic control, which could have big policy implications. That's all on the table with the Democratic trifecta. This week on America, actually, we're in Wisconsin. And we talked to Francesca Hong. We have an opportunity through Wisconsin to actually start improving the brand for Democrats.

Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. What if we told you there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter? Interested? And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable? No, it's not protein. it's actually fiber, the least sexy, most overlooked nutrient of all. But what is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough?

Is a powder you stir into some water going to do it for you? All that plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop obsessed father of cornflakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Now, Aaron, this isn't a documentary, obviously. You've built a story based on a story based on real people in real events. And from the West Wing to films like a few good men and Moneyball, you excel at heightening the dynamics, crafting dialogue and highlighting the humanness in these stories. So how much of the social acting from I can tell is fact versus storytelling, as you said, a painting? Give me one or two examples of key moments or characters you chose to dramatize and imagine versus rely on actual details. There was a film critic a few years ago

who wrote that when I write nonfiction, I use the real people for parts. And I thought that that was pretty accurate. I'll give you one example, the character that Bill Burr plays, Charlie Garrigan. Yes, Roger McNamee. You don't have to say it, but I've texted with him about it, but go ahead.

Thank you. Yeah. And the reason he's inspired by Roger McNamee and not called Roger McNamee, it's another, that was the first lawyer thing. Listen, I created a situation where Roger and Mark Zuckerberg would be in the same room at the same time arguing with each other. Yes, which doesn't really happen, right? Charlie says at the very beginning, if this wasn't an emergency, would I even be allowed in the building?

And the answer is no. So the lawyers felt that Facebook could say, well, we would never allow Roger McNamee in there. And so it looks like we're stupid and now we're going to sue you. So I changed the character's name. Well, he does articulate. Roger was very torn. I remember at the time, he and I would argue about Facebook.

He was very pro-Facebook until he wasn't. It's a moment of like, you know, road to Damascus for a lot of these people. Like, oh, no. Which happens a lot. It's interesting. You say, you know, I was sort of,

one thing I was trying to understand is whether there was a sort of Damascene moment along the way. And, you know, this thing that I thought about a lot, Justice Brandeis and the idea, of the curse of bigness. And, you know, if this is a companion piece, this is about the curse of bigness,

which couldn't possibly be more culturally relevant because of the other juggernauts that we're experiencing right now and this historical phenomenon that large technological breakthroughs have often, if not always, carried consequences that their creators are not able to or cannot control or foresee.

And that's what this movie is about to me, you know, at its core. Also about the Fourth Estate and how vital journalism is. And, you know, that's what really, really struck me on Sunday night when I saw the film. Well, what was key is that we all talked about this,

but then Jeff brought the proof, right? We talked about what was happening in there for years, but we needed the actual proof that Francis brought. And I think Francis's character is at the center of this, of course. It's about her. her journey. But then we meet Mark in 2021 while he's rehearsing congressional testimony for his team. He's strikingly cold and robotic, and Mark can be like that, referring to people as users and humans. And at

one point he says, this is a meeting where we make me likable, which made me laugh out loud, because when the first time I met him, he walked in and he was very robotic and, and I'm not cold, but robotic, and said, I hear you think I'm an asshole. And I said, I haven't met you yet, but people say you are. So let's see. Like, let's find out. out. And it was, especially in the early days, very awkward to talk to him. Something I wanted to include a trade of marks but couldn't was Roger would tell me that from time to time in a conversation, just he and Mark, that Mark would take a full two-minute pause. He'd just be silent for two minutes. And I thought, I'm not sure you can get away with a two-minute

silence. Though if anyone can do it, Jeremy. I was sad, actually, that we lost some of the time before I said, you know what, let's get to work. It was sad for me, too, believe. It is awkward, and he actually doesn't mean it. You know, there's reasons. He's a social awkward the way it is. Well, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, and he's not here to defend himself, but so, so. No, I don't think he's being a jerk by being silent. No, no. No, he's like a central processing unit. It's very much. And Gates has the same qualities. There's a lot of, you know, and they've improved, by the way, let me say. But one of the things right now among tech people is that empathy is toxic, empathy is suicidal. That's mostly from Elon and Peter Thiel. But how much empathy did you have for your character versus the character of Mark versus the real Mark? Well, for me, I'm dealing with the real Mark when I approach the subject. So, and I would say a radical amount, which is, I think, something that is,

going out of our world and something that is vital empathy. So, yeah, I think, you know, without it, we're just fighting fire with fire. And I felt a lot of empathy for the insoluble dilemmas that I felt that he was facing. And I believe him to be a principled and idealistic person. You know, Martin Luther King said in the future we'll have guided missiles and misguided men. So I also believe that he's misguided and myopic. But I do believe that his intentions to connect the world and give people a voice, that those things were sincere.

And so I also believe that he genuinely didn't think that it was his role as the leader of a private company to censor politicians in a democracy or to be the arbiter of truth. for a large percentage of the planet. Now, I might personally disagree with those things, but I had to find my way feelingly into having a respect for that point of view. What about you, Aaron? I only had empathy for Mark.

There was no moment, no scene where I felt like, well, I've got to write him as a jerk somehow. His first scene, the first thing he says after he spells his name, he says, that's what his occupation is. he says I'm a professional defendant. It's, I have him making a joke. And obviously the implication of the joke,

the last time we saw him, he was in two different depositions, he always has to answer for himself somehow. And Jeremy delivers the line with a slight smile on his face. His arguments, I disagree with his arguments. I didn't have to make them jerk. I had to make them the best version of that argument that I could.

So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here is yours. My name is Sherry Turkle. I'm the author of Artificial Intimacy. In your first film about Facebook, technology mediates relationships between people. In this new one, we see it encroaching directly on how people see themselves,

and more than that, trying to reframe reality. The circle grows from psychologists, to politics. These days, Mark Zuckerberg suggests that although people may want 15 close friends, most can only manage two or three, and Facebook meta will fill in with 12 avatar friends to make up the difference. Will that be a whole new movie? Do you see all these developments as a continuation of the story you began in the social network, or is something fundamentally different? Sherry's an amazing researcher, by the way, for decades. on this issue.

Well, first I'll say, as far as a whole new movie, this social reckoning opens Friday, October 9th. On October 10th, I will have no idea what I'm doing next. I will have no idea. And when I don't have an idea, it's impossible for me to imagine ever having an idea. But to the meat of her question, and that sounds terrifying to me.

Mark says, okay, if you only have two or three friends, the metaverse can provide you with... Thirteen fake ones, who will be nicer to you than your regular friends, because there's no friction. And that's one of the things he and many others talk about is, let's remove friction. And I was always like, no, no, we need friction. Friction is good, not hate, but friction. So, seamlessness is their favorite word. If in the social network in 2010, the idea essentially was, here's a guy who is not really comfortable in the social structure of college.

A lot of us feel that way. It feels there's a cool kids table someplace, and he's not at it, and they're not going to let him at it. So he is a genius. He builds his own digital, virtual, cool kids table that he's now the mayor of. What seems to be happening now, two things. One, he's trying to get not only as many people as possible to his cool kids table, growing the number of users. He's trying to get as much of our lives as possible to happen in this virtual world that he's creating that he is comfortable in. But the second thing, the really big difference between Facebook now and Facebook then is the news feed.

Back in 2010, it was a social media site. It was a way to keep up with your friends. once they added the news feed and that newsfeed is powered by an algorithm that means you're getting the news that you want to see and Jeremy's getting the news that he wants to see and so not only are we living with different facts but many, many people are going to be day after day. The top story is going to be an immigrant committed a crime. It's going to seem like that's the whole world, immigrants committing crime. Yep, absolutely. Jeremy, when you think about, like, I can't imagine you're using a muse charm, Jeremy Strong. I have to tell you. Like, and you talking to an AI agent. I don't see it.

No, I mean, I'm not on any social media whatsoever, but, and I love Sherry Turkle's work. You know, I think that these, what Aaron's talking about and the kind of the filter bubbles and echo chambers that we're all increasingly separated. by in a solipsistic way and living inside of are very dangerous. And I think this idea of frictionlessness is very dangerous. I think friction is life. That's where life is. You know, I guess for a long time, I believed, okay, these platforms are surfacing and amplifying and aggregating existing social dynamics and existing societal dynamics. And of course now, and what Aaron has written this movie about,

they're not just amplifying or surfacing them. They're shaping them. And so that is of great concern. And I hope that this film about that reckoning can also serve to illuminate these things and be a wake-up call and a creed occur for some of these leaders to make some changes and to do better.

Yeah, I doubt that now. I still doubt it. So Facebook currently has over 3 billion monthly active users and nearly 40% of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on Facebook according to Pew Research. Meanwhile, its business plan has killed the media, really, in a lot of ways. So that it makes it. It's not just that people get their news from it, that they've killed the other sources of news very handily through their business plan. When I interviewed Francis Howigan in late 2021, I told her, when you look at Mark's influence, it's very clear he's influential, but he pretends. that they're not. And let me add that in her Senate testimony, Francis said there's nobody currently holding Zuckerberg accountable himself and the buck stops with Mark. And that tension between growth and safety is critical and that pushes Francis to talk to the Wall Street Journal reporter. Because the power is now astonishing because Mark and the other tech people realize, as I've said many times, and I'll keep saying it, Trump is a coin-operated president. And these pretty non-political people are now deeply political. So talk about accountability and this power and influence on news, on social, and now on friendships even, and how we interact with each other, both of you.

First you, Erin. Sure. By the way, Francis also says that she thinks things are worse now than she, yeah. Okay. You said that essentially tech is taking journalism jobs. Not just that, but power everywhere. They're again. Right. There is that, which is a huge problem. But also, the rise of, we'll call them independent news sources. Okay. The, you know, when people say, do your research, those websites that they're going to, it feels like, did you ever happen to read the book by Andrew Keene, The Rise of the Amateur?

Sure did. A cult of the Amateur. Yes, I did. Yeah. It feels like those independent news sources to get a, a, you know, a realtor. a foothold to kind of climb up the ladder, just had to relentlessly trash traditional news sources. It's corporate news. It's fake news.

We're the real news somehow. And it's simply not true. The most reliable sources of news are still the traditional sources of news. Network news, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. The power that Facebook has now in that regard is immense. And I wanted to ask you, is there a precedent for this conversation even happening? The idea that one company, one guy is a threat to democracy? I guess what's his name?

Who started all the wars, William Randolph Hurst, I suppose. Right, yeah. The power that he had was not letting Citizen Kane advertised in her advertising. Right, right. It was smaller. It was smaller. But he caused wars. He created wars.

Which, by the way, Alex Gibney can't do, right? He can now because it got called out. Yeah. The people that Francis was talking to in those Senate hearings and the president, their campaigns are funded by the people who need to be regulated. And, you know, when we hear the president say he's not going to instruct any guardrails for AI, it's just we're going to rely on his moral compass. Self-policing. They're going to police themselves. Right. Yeah. I'm sure. That'll work. Yeah, the arsonists are real good at keeping them.

fire from happening. So the power is immense. Why? It's not like Facebook makes oil. They don't give us an essential thing. It's a social media site. Yeah. And a bad news aggregator. And one of the things you did talk about, which, again, this communications executives,

who was so great. And I love that actor. He's also in the audacity. Philly Magister. Yeah, he's fantastic. He's very funny. I agree. But he said, we're post-government around here. And it's a jarring remark. I've never heard of, I have to say. Like, they'd never deigned to say that. But I think sometimes they feel like it.

I asked Jeff Horowitz, uh, can you tell me an off-the-record thing that was said to you that you most wanted to, that you most wish was on the record? Wow. It was that. That. Oh, well, okay. It was we're post-government around.

Wow. I've never heard that. They're not stupid enough to say that to me, I guess. because I would tell on them. But when you think about that power, like one of the things that it's around is free speech, you know, in January 6th is sort of the formative thing.

When you were formulating this, I'd love you each to talk about why January 6th was the most important moment to frame this around. First you, Aaron, and then Jeremy. You know, my writing style, it tends to be romantic and idealistic, particularly about,

institutions and I think that that was planted it's by my father very early in my life I have a memory I have a terrible memory can't remember what much from when I was a kid but I remember watching Nixon leave the White House on a day that he resigned and this in in the Sorkin house this was not a national day of shame my father was very proud and he pointed to TV and he said look the most powerful man in the world is giving up power and there isn't a tank in the street you don't see a police officer nobody's gun was drawn and that stayed with me so when January 6th happened like most people uh it you know that was a horrifying terrible terrible thing my conversations my early conversations with

Jeff and Francis were about that responsibility, Facebook's culpability for January 6th, and they happened to be happening at the same time that I was having a number of conversations with Michael Phenone. This is the officer, D.C. officer. D.C. police officer, who was, he was twice electrocuted that day. Just got his brains beaten in.

the people who did it were pardon. And I just found myself thinking, like, there's only one person responsible for January 6th could not have done it without the help of Facebook. You said to Puck's Matt Bellany in 2024, I blame Facebook for January 6. Now, the spokesperson, let me just put this out because it's fair to be Facebook,

the responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those. who attack the Capitol on those who encourage them. I just call them handmade as to sedition, and they stop talking. I think that's a good way of putting it. You said that by looking at Facebook, that you could tell this is going to happen,

that you could see the water boiling. Why couldn't Facebook take down the things that were leading? Yeah. I think my answer is slightly indirect, January 6th being the culmination of something, both historically and dramatically. But your last interview with Mark, the infamous controversial interview, I guess to me, January 6th is the result of, so you guys got into it about why not take down these things. Why not take down Info Wars? why you know

Holocaust denial is abhorrent you disagree with it take it down right so eventually he takes down info wars and then Ted Cruz comes out and calls it a fascist attack on conservative voices and invokes the Holocaust

and says first they came for Alex Jones now I I want to decouple understanding from endorsement here I'm not endorsing that point of view but what I'm saying is The point of view of maintaining neutrality in that argument is what allowed January 6th to happen. That's the result of not being the ref, as Aaron writes in the film.

And so to me, that is why it's the sharp end of the spear in terms of what is the consequence of this position. Yeah, I agree. That's what I said to him in that interview. I'm like, today the anti-Semitism is going to flow downstream. It's going to be toxic and ugly. It's not, you didn't invent anti-Semitism, for goodness. sake. It's been going on for thousands of years, but it's going to get worse and worse and amplified, weaponized, and made into something real. I was like, it's going to jump off the screen. What about Sandy Hook Denial? Was anything done with that? Was that left up?

No, we talked about it because we started talking about Alex Jones, and I said, you have all these rules on the platform and you don't follow them. So just don't have the, don't pretend to have rules if you're not going to enforce them. And Alex kept breaking them over and over again. And Aaron, they were taken down. They weren't. And I also think at that point of that interview, there were 100 billion pieces of content across the platforms per day.

So even if 99% of that gets taken down, you're still not able to eradicate crime in New York City. And so that's Mark's point of view of that. But I also think that there is something that one can understand in that point of view. I'm not saying it's right. We'll be back in a minute. Spotify Ads Manager makes

it easy to create your first audio ad in minutes for free. Sign up today, launch a campaign, and start reaching your audience. Let's finish up talking about the future. The social reckoning is one of several Hollywood students taking aim at tech right now. I just spoke with director Alex Gibney about his new Elon Musk documentary, along with Justine Musk, who is devastating in that documentary. And I've done an hour-long interview with her, which is really, she really puts the pieces together beautifully. And Luca Guadino's Sam Altman biopic and Nathan

Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary. Is it a broader cultural backlash against tech amassing or something else? Are they just good stories? They are good stories. And Elizabeth is a constant good story in many ways.

I can only speak for myself, not Alex or Nathan or Luca. For me, it's a good story. And I think it's a coincidence that all four are happening at the same time. I know it feels like tech billionaires are sort of Hollywood's new Russians. But these people are now playing incredibly important roles in our lives, right? A role that I don't think Steve Jobs played, right?

No. Jeremy? Again, I mean, it's about holding the mirror up to nature and being the abstract. and brief chroniclers of our time. You know, that's our job, is to show the human story, which is different from an essay or from the news.

We need to be showing the human story of these things because they are the issues of our time. They are the third real issues of our time. Right. And actually, what's interesting about your depiction of Mark is everyone's like, oh, he's killed him. I'm like, no, no, he made him pathetic.

It's not mean. It's not. It's something else. Well, I have to say, it's certainly not my intention to make him pathetic. What I'm saying is I don't think you're being, they're like, you really screwed him. When I watched the 37 hours of congressional testimony over and over and over and over again, I started to get this sense of a person who is just being besieged from all sides and who is

desperately trying to stay afloat. And, you know, and I know you asked him to resign on the show and he, and he declined. And so, you know, but my attempt, you know, it's not necessarily to inobes, him, but it is to represent him fairly at the bar. I guess it's not pathetic. It's tragic. I would accept that more. I think you're right. When the resigned thing, I was sort of joking, but I just wanted to get his reaction in that regard. His, Jeremy's, I know what people think of me. So does my wife, so will my kids. I feel that, you know.

Anyway, I have two last questions. The real Jeff Horwitz, who's now a tech reporter for Reuters, recently posted on an ex-saying the current slew of current AI company, getting publicly uncomfortable gives me a sense of deja vu from covering meta for the last seven years. Concerns first get raised internally, and then they're ignored, then voiced broadly by employees who leave to work on external safety orgs, and then specifically described by exiting employees who aren't fully believed. And finally, come people who don't leave, but gather receipts. Sometimes those people go public, sometimes not. Francis was one of the first to do it in a very dangerous way to herself. Do you think we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes of what's happening now? It is getting

more play, and I think people are willing, especially in the data center backlash, I think regular people are quite concerned in the way they weren't when you first started working on these stories. I know so little about AI that all I can do, I don't think this is your question. All I can do is offer an opinion about AI as it pertains to my field. And it's that I'm optimistic, actually, because I think the audience is going to reject it. I think that if you play video games, if you play Call of Duty, you don't have an emotional connection to the people you're shooting in Call of Duty, that's going to be your experience watching AI Schindler's list. Yeah, yeah. Jeremy? I mean, I just think we are in a moment of existential civilizational crisis, and we're right there in the crosshairs of it.

right now. I think these red lines are being crossed. I think the issues of control and alignment are not being figured out and are being outpaced by the speed and acceleration of the technology. And it's the most powerful tool slash weapon that has ever been in anyone's hands in the history of human civilization and we need to wake up and regulate and do something about it. And it's privatized. Yeah, that's right.

No, and Ezra Klein's piece of, you know, two weeks ago was essentially that it's going to take a lot more red tape to go through to put a solar panel on the roof of the parking lot for these companies than it is to create this technology

that threatens to end civilization. Yeah. And what's the upside of the technology? We got our email summarized for us? Basically, efficiency, and frictionlessness, right? That's right. There are some very good. There will be, there could be. Not if the negatives, you know, not if anything comes about that people are saying is a legitimate percentage. No, 100%. It doesn't matter if we solve cancer for all dead. Back in 1970 something, when Woody Allen

made Annie Hall, he said, you know, it's good to make an effort once in a while. Yeah. Why, what is this quest for frictionlessness? Well, I don't know. You know, I used to call, when they were making all these apps like dry cleaning delivery, all the food delivery. I said San Francisco is assisted living for millennials right now. And so, you know, they just like everything easy. Kara, I am an executive producer on a movie that Tom McCarthy made called a statement, which is based on Nathaniel Rich's book Losing Earth. And it's about the climate crisis. And, you know, it's essentially the same thing, which is we have all the information. We know what's coming. And because of our nature as humans, and our refusal to see what's in front of us.

You know, we're blind in the face of events. And we're seeing now with climate the steep cost of inaction. We're not going to have the luxury of 30 years to see that steep cost with AI. No, and the thing I say, I do compare it to nuclear weaponry, which is, you know, like, if we had privatized nuclear weapons

and everyone got a nuclear weapon, And there's a reason we're not dead from nuclear weapons because we went global as a group, as a society together to do it on a global basis. And last question. The film is called The Social Reckoning. Reckoning is a great word. It's implicit in the title that there will be consequences. And META is dealing with some of the consequences related to landmark addiction lawsuits,

which they're losing and will lose more of them. But we're still living in this polarized world that Facebook helped create. And an angry world, the politically angry world, the facilitation of people like Donald Trump, the platform remains very powerful. So I'd like each of you to reflect on reckoning and what it means, because one of the things I've said for almost two decades around is these people don't think about consequences ever because they've never felt unsafe and they've never had to live consequences.

So what does accountability do having done this movie look like? What's a reckoning? For me, the reckoning in the title was about the consequence. Here's what happens. you feed people misinformation for long enough, you feed people content designed to make them angry, here's what it's going to look like. You know, we start off in the film

with fairly benign examples, right? Somebody thinks that chlorophyll is an internal deodorant, somebody else thinks that 5G cell phone towers, we've got a young girl being bullied at school. And then the final see. And I remember asking, I can't remember whether it was Francis or Jeff, but imagine for me something that's worse than January 6th. What's the next thing? And they just shook their heads. They weren't able to conceive of it. And I think that one of the things we're all guilty of is a failure of imagination. Yeah. Although I can imagine. I can imagine a lot. You are not guilty of the failure of imagination. One of the people ask me, what's danger. I said nuclear war was our biggest threat to humanity. And now it's AI that can set off

nuclear war without our, like, it really can. It really could. I don't understand why that's better than the setting off bomb system that we had before. What exactly? Jeremy, last word on reckoning. I shouldn't have the last word in this interview. So we should give it back to Aaron. But, you know, I don't have a great answer to that. You know, I mean, perhaps this film is a form of that reckoning, you know, a cultural reckoning. I fear that it's going to take a Hiroshima Nagasaki type event for everybody to wake up. And I fear that that will be the reckoning for us to find accountability. But clearly these people elude accountability and deflect accountability and are in a sense post-accountability.

You know, I played Donald Trump's mentor in a film a few years ago. who was sort of the progenitor of fake news and misinformation and had no conscience whatsoever and no shame. And we see everything he believed and coded in everything our president does. And so a lot of these things have been with us before social media and are endemic to us as human beings. But I fear that the reckoning, unfortunately, might be a catastrophic event that is brought about by this Promethean fire that we are all really on.

wisely playing with. Well, that's well said, and I think you guys have done an amazing job of this. And one of the things that's really important is to, as you said, Jeremy, is to put, I think more than a painting, it's a mirror, and they need to see themselves over and over again. At some point, it may sink in, possibly. Possibly. That's my hope, because they have enormous power, and they're not up to the task of the power they have.

So I appreciate it. And it was a great, is a great film, and I appreciate the work you guys have done on it. Thanks very much. Thanks, Kara. Thanks, Erin. Today's show was produced by Vicki Vergolina, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsopp, Megan Bernie, and Madeline LaPlante Duby.

Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Aiman Whalen, Jim Mackle, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Juan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you can manage more than three close human friends. If not, have fun with Mark in the Metaverse. It is no fun, FYI.

Go over you listen to podcasts, search for On with Caras Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Caroushisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.