Aaron Sorkin thinks The Social Reckoning should somehow not be political

The writer and director said that the movie is "not a red-blue thing."

By Olivia Singh  |  September 30, 2026 | 5:40pm
Photo: Columbia Pictures
Film News The Social Reckoning
Aaron Sorkin thinks The Social Reckoning should somehow not be political

The Social Reckoning addresses the connection between Facebook and politics, but writer-director Aaron Sorkin is reluctant to wade too deeply into the red and blue of it all. The film, a sequel to the 2010 hit The Social Network about Facebook’s birth, is set years later, after the platform has grown exponentially and become a major influence in social and political life. The Social Reckoning follows Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a mid-level Facebook engineer and whistleblower who leaked thousands of internal documents with help from Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter. The film’s other storyline involves Mark Zuckerberg (played by Succession‘s Jeremy Strong, since Jesse Eisenberg wasn’t interested in reprising the role, despite Sorkin’s best efforts) prepping for Congressional hearings. The movie hasn’t been released yet, but it appears to reference how Facebook played a role in spreading misinformation leading up to the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump’s name isn’t mentioned in the film, so naturally, the omission has come up in interviews during The Social Reckoning press tour.  

In an interview published on Tuesday, Sorkin told Vanity Fair that he was “never” asked to leave Trump’s name out of the movie. “I turned in the script and a day or two later met with Tom Rothman, who was full speed ahead on it. And I promised him, unprovoked, that we would not see any Trump signage, no ‘Make America Great Again,'” Sorkin said. “The movie is about Facebook’s role and the rise of divisiveness, extremism, and hyper-partisanship in the country. It is not a red-blue thing, even though, obviously, it will be felt that way.” 

Sorkin made similar comments in an interview with Politico, and added that he didn’t want that particular sequence to include Trump signage “because it would become a distraction.”

“I felt like as soon as we got to that scene, as soon as you saw anything ‘Trump,'” he said. “It would just become about something else. Again, I realize it’s going to kind of become about that ‘something else’ anyway. But I just like to have clean hands.” It’s a peculiar stance for the director and writer of a film that examines how the social media platform contributed to political misinformation. After all, The Social Reckoning is about how Facebook’s messy hands were exposed in The Wall Street Journal’s 2011 investigation, The Facebook Files. “I’m not going to deny, of course, that the movie is political,” Sorkin told Politico. “I just think it shouldn’t be.”

 
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