‘The Social Network’ sequel will focus on Haugen leaks, with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg
Fifteen years after “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin will write and direct a sequel film called “The Social Reckoning,” set for release on October 9, 2026.
Jesse Eisenberg will not reprise his breakout role as Mark Zuckerberg, but instead will be replaced with the more sallow, serious Jeremy Strong.
Best known for playing Kendall Roy in “Succession,” Strong is known for his method acting, a technique in which the actor tries to immerse themselves in the mental and emotional state of the character… so if Strong suddenly takes up MMA fighting and gets really excited about a social metaverse that no one wants, then we’ll know that filming is imminent.
This film won’t pick up directly where “The Social Network,” which chronicled the rise of Facebook, left off. Instead, the story centers around Frances Haugen (played by Mikey Madison), the former Facebook employee who leaked a massive trove of internal documents to a Wall Street Journal reporter (played by Jeremy Allen White) and accused the company of prioritizing “profits over people” in 2021.
Among the most damning revelations from Haugen’s leak was internal research showing that the company was well aware that Instagram was harming the mental health of teenage girls. Haugen said in congressional testimony that Facebook was “literally fanning ethnic violence” in Ethiopia, since content moderation efforts in non-English languages were under-resourced. Her leaked documents also revealed that 87% of Meta’s spending on reducing misinformation went toward English language content, though English speakers make up just 9% of users.
Zuckerberg and Facebook — rebranded to Meta shortly after Haugen’s leaks — have always rankled at how “The Social Network” depicts the company’s origin. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg revealed in an interview that he saw the movie one time as part of an outing with other Facebook employees, which was arranged because he knew that they would go see the movie anyway.
“It was weird, man,” he said. “They got all these very specific details of what I was wearing, or these specific things correct, but then the whole narrative arc around my motivations and all this stuff were like, completely wrong.”
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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
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