Is The Social Reckoning based on a true story? Sorkin didn't invent the whistleblower

The Social Reckoning opened in theaters on October 9. Sorkin wrote and directed it as a companion piece to The Social Network, and built it on the Wall Street Journal's 2021 investigation, the Facebook Files. Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the Facebook employee who leaked the documents behind it. Jeremy Allen White plays Jeff Horwitz, the Journal reporter she leaked them to, and Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg.

The whistleblower is real

Haugen is an Iowa native with degrees from Olin College and Harvard. She worked at Google and Yelp before Facebook hired her, and her path to the Journal took about two years:

• 2019 — she joins Facebook as a product manager on its Civic Integrity team, which worked on election misinformation.
• After the 2020 election — Facebook disbands the team.
• May 2021 — she resigns, having copied tens of thousands of pages of internal documents.
• September 2021 — the Journal starts publishing the Facebook Files.
• October 3, 2021 — she reveals her identity on 60 Minutes.
• October 5, 2021 — she testifies before a Senate subcommittee.

She told the story herself in a 2023 memoir, The Power of One, which Madison read to prepare. Horwitz is real too, and so is the series he wrote with her documents.

The friend is real, too, mostly

The film gives Frances a friend she lost to online extremism, and that part comes from Haugen's life. While she was recovering from a serious illness, she hired a friend to help around the house. The friend spent a lot of time on online forums and came out the other side believing in white nationalism and the occult. Haugen has said losing that friendship is why she wanted to work on misinformation at Facebook.

The film's version of that friend is the drunk young woman, played by Portia Doubleday, who films two police officers in the movie's opening scene. Her arc, all the way to the Capitol on January 6, is invented.

What Sorkin changed

The broad strokes hold up. The details move around:

• The team — the film implies Civic Integrity was dissolved earlier than it was. In reality, Facebook shut it down after the 2020 election.
• The count — the film says the Journal ran 14 articles. The Facebook Files series ran to 17 parts.
• The calendar — the film has Zuckerberg preparing for congressional hearings on January 6, during the Capitol riot. The hearings it builds to took place that September and October.
• The ally — Bill Burr's Charlie Garrigan, a friend of Zuckerberg's, is a composite, not a real person.
• The illness — Haugen's near-death experience, which she has talked about publicly, isn't in the film at all.

Haugen told TIME the film had to make choices and "focus on the things that would give us the most insight" into her experience and into how Facebook works.

Don't miss: Is The Lowdown a true story? The real man died in 2015 — and his family says FX is 'muddying fact and fiction'

What Haugen thinks of it

She's "very, very happy" with how it turned out, she told People. Sorkin first got in touch a few months after she came forward and later sent her that heavily annotated script.

"There's a fidelity to it," Haugen told TIME.

She also credited Sorkin with making "typing at a computer compelling for two hours." As for Zuckerberg, she hopes he sees Strong's performance and asks himself one question: "Do I want to be living this life?"

Previously we wrote: Back to the Future's director is losing his edit room to Jennifer Lopez