Much like its acclaimed predecessor, Aaron Sorkin’s new film “The Social Reckoning” examines and dramatizes the real people in Mark Zuckerberg’s orbit.
Billed as a companion piece to the 2010 hit film “The Social Network,” which told the story of Facebook’s early-aughts founding and rapid climb to a multibillion-dollar valuation, “The Social Reckoning” stars Jeremy Strong as a grown-up Zuckerberg in the throes of wealth, power, and scandal.
“The Social Reckoning” also stars Oscar winner Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, better known as the “Facebook whistleblower.”
Starting in September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published “The Facebook Files,” an investigative series made possible by Haugen, a data scientist and former product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team.
Haugen leaked tens of thousands of internal documents after leaving the company, sharing many with reporter Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White) to expose its harmful policies and prompt change at the company.
Here’s everything to know about the real-life woman who inspired Madison’s character.
Frances Haugen began her career at Google in 2006
Sony
Born and raised in Iowa, Haugen studied computer engineering and later earned a master’s degree in business from Harvard.
In her 2023 memoir, “The Power of One,” Haugen writes that when she arrived in Silicon Valley in 2006, it was very much a boys club. She felt like an outlier.
“Blonde women were on the sales team or were marketers,” Haugen writes. “They did not code — but I did.”
On that note: Sorkin told Business Insider’s Jason Guerrasio that Madison was keen to dye her hair blonde, but he dissuaded her from the idea. (They did, however, agree to give Madison a shorter haircut.)
“I didn’t want her worried about that in the performance,” Sorkin said. “I always worry, like for instance, if I cast a British actor and they need to do an American accent, is that going to be your concern every moment of every day? Are you going to be able to do what I need you to do in terms of getting into the text if all you’re thinking about is the American accent?”
In “The Social Reckoning,” Haugen is shown dealing with dismissive comments from male colleagues, like one who tells her to join a dating app because she would “benefit from loosening up.”
Haugen spent the first eight years of her career working in various positions at Google. She resigned from the company in 2014, largely due to health issues. She was diagnosed with celiac disease and later with non-occlusive temperature-sensitive vasoconstrictive disorder, a rare condition that causes chronic pain and inflammation in cold temperatures.
Haugen was hired by Facebook in 2019 to work on the civic integrity team
After Haugen’s health improved, she worked at other major tech companies, including Yelp and Pinterest, before being recruited by Facebook in 2019.
She has said she agreed to work at Facebook on the condition that her role would be in detecting and combating misinformation on the platform, motivated by a former friend who’d become obsessed with conspiracy theories.
“It’s one thing to study misinformation, it’s another to lose someone to it,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “A lot of people who work on these products only see the positive side of things.”
Haugen was assigned to monitor Facebook’s impact on international elections and protect against election interference, and later said she was shocked by the “horrifying magnitude of the danger that we were facing.” Haugen said her breaking point was when the civic integrity team was dissolved in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, and she quit in May 2021 — but not before secretly copying about 22,000 internal documents, many of which she shared with Horwitz and federal law enforcement. (At the time, Facebook said the civic integrity team wasn’t dissolved, but “integrated into a larger Central Integrity team.”)
Haugen, then 37, sought federal whistleblower protection with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
She then publicly revealed her identity during a “60 Minutes” interview with Scott Pelley.
“When they got rid of civic integrity, it was the moment where I was like, I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous,” Haugen told Pelley.
Haugen said the root of Facebook’s problems is how it optimizes for engagement: Posts that contain divisive language and misinformation are more likely to elicit likes, comments, and shares, so the algorithm amplifies them.
“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads,” she said. “Facebook makes more money when you consume more content.”
Haugen added that, in her view, Facebook routinely prioritizes “profit over safety.”
The documents obtained by Haugen included a range of internal reports and studies showing, in part, that Facebook’s algorithm had encouraged political parties around the world to embrace extremist ideas; that drug traffickers and human traffickers openly used Facebook’s services; and that Instagram, acquired by Facebook in 2012, increased rates of depression and eating disorders among its users, especially teenage girls, more so than other social media apps.
Haugen testified before Congress in October 2021
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Haugen testified before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection that Facebook not only causes harm but does so knowingly, while hiding its research from the public.
In her opening remarks, Haugen said that Facebook is used to “deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”
Haugen also stressed the need for government regulation, telling the lawmakers, “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.”
“When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action. When we figured out cars were safer with seat belts, the government took action. And today, the government is taking action against companies that hid evidence on opioids,” she said in her written testimony. “I implore you to do the same here.”
Haugen’s testimony received bipartisan support, and Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, called Haugen “A 21st-century American hero.”
Zuckerberg said in a statement that Haugen presented a “false narrative” about the company.
Where is Haugen now?
Peter Rae/Sydney Morning Herald via Getty Images
Weeks after Haugen’s testimony, Facebook Inc. rebranded to Meta.
The following year, Haugen said in an interview with Bloomberg that Meta likely wouldn’t improve unless Zuckerberg stepped down.
“No one but Mark Zuckerberg can control Facebook right now,” she said. “I don’t think the company can recover as long as he is the leader of it.”
Four years later, Zuckerberg continues to act as chairman and CEO of Meta. The company recently launched a bespoke AI chatbot called Muse.
Haugen has continued to criticize social media algorithms and the tech titans who oversee them, including Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter, now X, in 2022.
In March 2026, Haugen spoke to NPR’s “Here & Now Anytime” about the landmark social media addiction trial, which found both Meta and Google liable for harming young users’ mental health. Meta was ordered to pay $4.2 million in damages to the 20-year-old plaintiff, while Google’s subsidiary YouTube was ordered to pay $1.8 million.
“What the jury decided was that Facebook knew their algorithms would preferentially push people toward more extreme topics. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it does make you consume the products more,” Haugen said. “So unless we have consequences like this, they’re not going to give us the best of social media.”
Haugen was also a key source for Sorkin while he was writing “The Social Reckoning,” acting as a consultant, though she was not directly involved in the film’s script or production.
“We screened it for her just a couple of weeks ago,” Sorkin told Vanity Fair in September. “That was a scary two hours for me. Fortunately, she really loved it.”
Haugen now lives in Puerto Rico with her husband, Alex Newman, an entrepreneur and cofounder of the security software HCaptcha, and their 1-year-old daughter. She told Elle in August that she lives a slower, more relaxed life than her whistleblowing mythology might imply.
“You can believe whatever you want about me,” she said. “I have a very happy life, I have a very cute baby, and I get to live by the ocean.”
