- First trailer for The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning, has been released
- Stars Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in leading roles
- Movie explores the 2021 whistleblowing scandal, but release coincides with another whistleblower being ‘silenced’
The first trailer for The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning, has been released (which you can catch up with below).
Starring Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison, the new movie is set to follow the 2021 Facebook internal document leak to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal by whistleblower, engineer Frances Haugen.
Described by Sony as a “spiritual successor” to The Social Network rather than a traditional sequel, The Social Reckoning will pick up 17 years after the first film ends with an entirely new cast and swaps director David Fincher for Aaron Sorkin (though Sorkin wrote the original screenplay for both).
The trailer has split fan opinion online, with some praising Strong for his “scarily accurate” portrayal of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while others have dubbed it “unnecessary” and a “SNL sketch.”
If you’re somebody who has kept up with Facebook-related news over the first few years, you might have noticed that the timing of the trailer release is particularly interesting.
While it doesn’t involve Haugen or anything we’ll see in the new movie, another Facebook whistleblower, Sarah Wynn-Williams, has been “silenced” by the company mere days before The Social Reckoning debuted its first look.
Around the same time as The Social Reckoning is beginning to be promoted, Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Director of Public Policy at Facebook, was ‘banned’ from promoting her Meta expose book, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, at the Hay-on-Wye literature and arts Festival on May 31.
Why? With Meta strongly disputing the book’s claims, the company obtained an arbitration ruling in the US ahead of the book’s publication based on an agreement Wynn-Williams signed upon leaving the company.
This means that the author is banned from promoting or publicly discussing the book, with failure to comply with the rules potentially resulting in penalties of up to $50,000 per breach. As a result, Wynn-Williams sat in silence during her entire panel discussion at the festival.
The situation was described by panel host Carole Cadwalladr as “an author in a hostage situation.” Copies of the book were removed from sale during the festival over concerns its sale could be tied to Wynn-Williams’ promotion.
For those who cannot wait for The Social Reckoning‘s release date of October 9, Careless People is a fantastic starting point to begin to get insight into Facebook’s whistleblowing scandals (and I’d recommend this as an audiobook on Spotify, Audible and more).
Sales have reportedly increased by 300% since the ‘silencing.’
Featured whistleblower Haugen also has a memoir to tide us over while we wait, with The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook being released in 2023.
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