My wife and I finally saw Aaron Sorkin’s long-awaited sequel to The Social Network this past weekend. To minimize spoilers, here are my top-three takeaways:

• The Good: Should Facebook “fact-check” political ads? My favorite scenes in The Social Reckoning are the tense exchanges between Jeremy Strong and Bill Burr (see, for example, the film clip posted below), but the sequel is nowhere near as good as The Social Network.
• The Bad: Alas, the sequel is a day late and a dollar short, for as evil as Zuck might be [*], Facebook and other social media platforms are now “small potatoes” compared to, say, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
• The Ugly: If The Social Reckoning is to be believed, Facebook played a pivotal role in the chain of events leading up to the violent insurrection in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. (Or to be more precise, it was a series of changes that Facebook made to its secret algorithms that created the conditions that led to J-6.) The sequel thus poses a critical counterfactual question: would J-6 have still occurred had these behind-the-scenes changes not been made?

[*] Is Zuckerberg, for example, lawful evil, neutral evil, or chaotic evil?