Film what you know, they say, and what Aaron Sorkin knows, above all, is show business. That’s why “Being the Ricardos,” his 2021 bio-pic about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, is one of the most insightful recent behind-the-scenes dramas. As the story of a minor actress becoming what would now be called a showrunner of genius, it’s energized by Sorkin’s similar career arc and the passions that have fuelled it. This is already a glance askance at Sorkin’s new film, “The Social Reckoning,” about the whistle-blower whose revelations, in 2021, shook Facebook. Sorkin wrote and directed it, and his self-proclaimed unfamiliarity with the tech world makes itself felt in both domains. The failure isn’t in his view of the digital nuts and bolts of social media but in the mind-set, the psychology of characters in that field.

“The Social Reckoning” is, of course, a natural sequel to “The Social Network” (2010), the film that Sorkin wrote about the founding of Facebook. There he keenly discerned that what mattered to the still adolescent Mark Zuckerberg about the technology he wielded was the prominence that it gave him in his own social realm; it was a script about varieties of power. But what made the movie more than a pat tale of outsider arrogance, what gave the movie its excitement and its energy, was its direction, by David Fincher, who is himself something of a tech whiz of a filmmaker. Fincher’s sophisticated methods were deployed to create a portrait of a nerd protagonist (played by Jesse Eisenberg) who glowed with a mysterious and wondrous inner illumination of genius—genius here coming off as an aesthetically extreme but morally neutral quality.

In “The Social Reckoning,” Zuckerberg (now played by Jeremy Strong) is more of a supporting role, but, even when he’s offscreen, he remains the central subject. The movie centers on an investigative reporter named Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) who, in 2019, joins the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, and on a Facebook employee named Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), who starts providing Jeff with insider information about changes to the platform’s algorithm—mandated by Zuckerberg—that boosted posts a colleague calls “rage bait,” including conspiracy theories, disinformation, and hate-mongering. Sorkin is palpably fascinated by the maneuvers of journalism: the movie is rich in practicalities of the trade, as when Jeff, trying to penetrate the wall of secrecy that protects Facebook’s internal policies and practices, recruits a pair of interns, Evelyn (Kelley Pereira) and Zach (Aidan Laprete), to write individualized letters to hundreds of the company’s employees via LinkedIn.

The employees receiving the letters work in Facebook’s civic-integrity department, which is said to be isolated from the business side, so that it can solely consider users’ best interests. As such, it’s an annoyance to the company’s leaders, and especially to Zuckerberg. That’s why Frances responds to Jeff’s appeal. Inspired by social media’s power of “democratization,” she had joined the company expressly to improve it, after witnessing a formerly progressive friend’s right-wing radicalization through relentless exposure to incendiary propaganda on Facebook. Frances still loves her job and the company, and she has no desire to be fired, let alone sued (she has signed an N.D.A.), so her contact with Jeff resembles espionage. She first arranges to meet him on a hiking trail, and she carefully decks herself out for plausible deniability (complete with birding-ready camera) but is still terrified of running into a colleague. When she dares to visit Jeff at his apartment, she dresses much more flashily than usual, so that any observer would assume she’s on a date.

Jeff, for his part, is a smooth professional handler, providing Frances with a burner phone preloaded with his number. When Frances, frustrated by her bosses’ dismissal of her concerns, decides to feed Jeff documents, he says that he can’t physically handle any of her electronic devices—but she can leave them open and he can look. (Sorkin makes sure to hark back to the granddaddy of whistle-blowers, Daniel Ellsberg.) Jeff also takes information that Frances provides and runs with it, conducting a separate experiment, with the help of Evelyn, who mimics the Facebook activity of someone like Frances’s radicalized friend to see what the algorithm throws at her.

The bond between Frances and Jeff, however, isn’t merely instrumental; they find that they have much in common. Both are nerds, of different varieties. Frances, although fluent in tech, is also prodigiously literary, providing Sorkin fodder for several snappily written scenes. When a Facebook executive (Billy Magnussen) sneeringly compares her to the mythical prophet Cassandra, a figure he likens to the boy who cried wolf, she sets him straight: unlike the shepherd boy, Cassandra was alert to real danger. Later, Frances explains to Jeff that what made her take the risk of contacting him were the high ideals she’d absorbed from art and literature. She tells him that, nonetheless, she never intended to be a Frank Capra character, evidently meaning the ones played by Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jeff, meanwhile, is a classic-musicals nerd who has “Show Boat” blaring in the background when she calls and who has many more Capra titles on tap than she does. Both are single—Sorkin shows Frances on one disastrous date with a finance bro who, himself, imbibes misinformation from Facebook—and their mutual recognition as smart misfits seals their collaboration.

Frances is much more of a misfit, though. Jeff, after all, is part of a social profession, a caller and a persuader, and his intelligence is less purely intellectual and more rounded, whereas Frances is a quintessential academic nerd, strong in all subjects, assertive in her understanding, impatient with those who are slower on the uptake. (Jeff calls her “scary mean.”) She is detail-oriented and tautly literal, full of intellectual self-confidence, and exasperated by its social price. In effect, she plays the role in “The Social Reckoning” that the character of Mark Zuckerberg played in “The Social Network”: she’s the genius whose insight, passion, and inspiration are the engine of the story, and she’s the character at whom the movie looks beamingly and wondrously. Jeff, on the other hand, serves the drama much as the role of Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) did in the earlier film. He’s the worldlier player, whose experience and institutional connections are essential for the genius character to have an impact on the world stage.

Although “The Social Reckoning” has as wide a purview as its predecessor, it feels much narrower. It ranges through the highest reaches of power—a tech behemoth, a mighty newspaper, the halls of Congress—in such critical times as the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2020 election, the attempted coup on January 6th, yet it still feels small. This is partly because Sorkin’s narrative, zipping back and forth in time between events from 2019, 2020, and 2021, forces scenes into spartan simplicity for the sake of clarity. And perhaps life itself feels smaller now, compared with the era depicted in “The Social Network,” likely because of the shift in attention caused precisely by social media. Where life used to mean living with heads up and gazing outward at the world at large, heads are now turned down, gazing at tiny screens where the truer and realer aspect of life seems, absurdly, to be happening. The recent turn to online life has no history, personal or public, in the film, which hardly gives that epochal transition any play. Sorkin’s story is assembled with precision, its information dispensed to yield pieces that fit together exactly and without excess. As a result, the characters are shorn of any traits that don’t serve the outcome—and so is the world around them.

In “The Social Reckoning,” Zuckerberg first shows up in a lecture hall at Facebook, being coached by a public-relations strategist named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), for an appearance before a Senate committee. He is going to be asked about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and is preparing to testify that repealing this section would “kill the internet,” by forcing Facebook and other platforms to vet and suppress, or, he says, censor people’s posts. (He will suggest that the internet and social media need proper regulation, by law, from Congress itself.) But there’s no discussion of what makes Section 230 so crucial, which is that it defines internet platforms as common carriers rather than publishers, akin to phone companies rather than newspapers. Just as a phone provider isn’t responsible for fraudulent or libellous remarks made by callers, e-mail services and social-media sites are given similar exemption.

The mention of Section 230 dangles the prospect that law and its intended and unintended effects will run like a thread through the film, with tense debate over substantive issues, backroom maneuvers, and power plays involving legal scholars, lobbyists, and politicians. Instead, Sorkin treats it as a MacGuffin; Frances and Jeff don’t discuss it in detail and neither do Zuckerberg and his colleagues. Indeed, Zuckerberg’s role is largely reduced to a personal tussle with a former investor, here called Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), who left Facebook on principle and now presses Zuckerberg on the single subject of fact-checking political ads. The magnitude of the issues at hand paradoxically renders the character of Zuckerberg superfluous; with little actual function in the drama, he becomes a purely emblematic villain—in effect, rage bait for the audience. As played by Strong and as directed by Sorkin, the character is completely untethered from the one in “The Social Network” and is now simply grotesque, a visitor from “Digger.”

In “Being the Ricardos,” Sorkin inhabited the main characters (or vice versa), and dramatized stories, both grand and intimate, that were intricately rooted in character. In “The Social Reckoning,” he instrumentalizes his characters, doesn’t so much tell their stories as tell his story through them. As portrayed here, Jeff and Frances have little outward definition or personality beyond the manner and tone of the actors. They lack aura, a special loss given the sheer presence that Madison brings to Frances. The actress vigorously and thoughtfully incarnates the character’s imperious but principled nerdiness, in a performance that, even in the camera’s too brief and too neutral glances, hints at unfathomed depths. The reason that “The Social Network” remains in the public mind a decade and half after its release is the power of its portraiture, the result of a complex synergy between Jesse Eisenberg’s performance and Fincher’s exacting camera style, the fierce intensity of proximity and duration that make the images seem like digital paintings. In “The Social Reckoning,” Sorkin’s images aren’t conceived or imagined; they’re mere recordings of the actors’ performances. The film suggests no pleasure in seeing, no curiosity. Sorkin doesn’t look beyond the words on the page, and the film itself appears made with heads down. ♦