Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning just opened in U.S. theaters, and Sony Pictures is promoting it with a spot that takes a direct shot at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the film’s antagonist. The ad is running on Meta’s own platforms.
The ad intercuts scenes of Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, including a shot of him wearing headphones, with on-screen text that reads, “Mark Zuckerberg will LOVE The Social Reckoning*.” As Strong’s Zuckerberg looks puzzled and concerned, the asterisk gets its payoff: “*Instagram doesn’t fact-check most ads. Why should we?” The spot closes with the character asking, “Did you know this was happening?” before the title card appears.
The opening line is an intentional misdirect. Neither Zuckerberg nor Meta has commented publicly on the film, but the CEO has never hidden his feelings about Sorkin’s last take on him. In a 2014 public Q&A, Zuckerberg said the makers of 2010’s The Social Network got details like the office design right but “just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful,” singling out the film’s suggestion that he created Facebook to attract women.
The Social Network, which Sorkin wrote and David Fincher directed, starred Jesse Eisenberg as a Harvard-era Zuckerberg and followed Facebook’s founding and his legal battles with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and cofounder Eduardo Saverin. Sony bills The Social Reckoning, which Sorkin wrote and directed, as a companion piece rather than a sequel. It jumps ahead to the company’s more recent turmoil and is told largely from the perspective of Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), the former Facebook product manager who in 2021 leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The resulting “Facebook Files” series showed the company was aware of problems, including how Instagram harmed the mental health of teen girls.
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The ad’s punch line ties directly to the film’s themes. According to Deadline, the movie deals with Zuckerberg’s long-standing reluctance to fact-check political ads on Meta’s platforms. In January 2025, Meta went further, announcing it would end its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. and replace it with a crowdsourced Community Notes system modeled on X’s.
The spot is posted as a reel on the film’s Instagram page, where the caption adds another layer of audacity: “Let’s see how long it takes them to take this down.” The video went up a week ago and has accumulated more than 9,000 likes, 300 shares, and 72 comments. So far, Meta has not removed it, and the company did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Sony appears to be enjoying the fight. Deadline reported that the studio deliberately released the teaser on the same day Meta settled a child-harm case brought by state attorneys general, and that Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki has seen the ad and liked it. Meta, for its part, hasn’t ignored the film entirely: Sorkin told the New York Times that Meta representatives reached out asking for tickets.
The Social Reckoning had its world premiere Oct. 4 in New York and opens in U.S. theaters Oct. 9. In addition to Strong’s Zuckerberg and Madison’s Haugen, Jeremy Allen White stars as Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, while Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, Betty Gilpin, Sierra Capri, Wunmi Mosaku, and Portia Doubleday round out the cast.
