The Ben Shapiro Show - June 11, 2026


Why The Social Reckoning Trailer Pushes the Wrong Narrative


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

188.87

Word count

1,788

Sentence count

147


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Okay, time for a thing that I don't know if I like or I hate yet.
00:00:05.000 There is a new trailer out for the sequel to The Social Network.
00:00:11.000 The Social Network is the Aaron Sorkin piece about the original cutthroat nature of the founding of Facebook.
00:00:19.000 It's not totally accurate, but it's a well written movie.
00:00:22.000 Well, now there's a follow up movie called Social Reckoning about the evils of Facebook and the wonders of the whistleblowers against Facebook.
00:00:30.000 Sorkin has gotten a little heavy handed, he was always pretty heavy handed.
00:00:34.000 My biggest problem with Aaron Sorkin's writing, and again, he's super talented, but my biggest problem with Aaron Sorkin's writing is that every single character is just Aaron Sorkin wearing a mask.
00:00:42.000 Okay, but here is the trailer for Social Reckoning that was making all the rounds yesterday.
00:00:48.000 It's got a big cast.
00:00:52.000 Listen, before I go on, I want to make something clear.
00:00:55.000 Okay.
00:00:56.000 I have a hunch you're not a fan of Facebook, but I am.
00:00:59.000 I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it, okay?
00:01:03.000 You send me a message.
00:01:05.000 What would you like to talk about?
00:01:10.000 The chairman gavels the session to order.
00:01:14.000 You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now.
00:01:17.000 That's a separate session.
00:01:19.000 And we'll move to witness questioning.
00:01:23.000 Spell your name and state your current occupation for the record M A R K Z U C K E R B E R G.
00:01:30.000 And your occupation?
00:01:33.000 I'm a professional defendant.
00:01:35.000 I run class fires on political groups where 30% of content hits multiple risk factors.
00:01:39.000 Hang on, I don't understand what you're saying.
00:01:41.000 Aren't you a tech reporter?
00:01:43.000 Ish.
00:01:44.000 Ish?
00:01:45.000 These guys are counting on the next round of congressional testimony to make you likable, Mark.
00:01:49.000 I'm happy to lend a hand, but I think you're doomed.
00:01:55.000 This company and that guy are playing an unprecedented role in our lives.
00:02:02.000 The fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air is coming out here.
00:02:06.000 I'm a free speech absolutist.
00:02:08.000 They would not be making this film.
00:02:10.000 You can pause for one second.
00:02:12.000 They would absolutely 100% not be making this film if it were not for the fact that Donald Trump won the last election cycle.
00:02:17.000 It would not be happening.
00:02:19.000 It would absolutely not be happening because Facebook has ridden the roller coaster of politics for the last 15 years.
00:02:26.000 First, when Barack Obama was president, everybody was happy with Facebook.
00:02:30.000 Look how the Obama team is utilizing new Facebook methods in order to win.
00:02:34.000 They're geniuses and good, good luck to Facebook.
00:02:37.000 They've done an amazing job.
00:02:38.000 And then Donald Trump won in 2016.
00:02:40.000 And the entire left wing decided to blame Facebook for Donald Trump winning.
00:02:43.000 And in retaliation, they went after anyone who was doing well on Facebook, including this particular company, The Daily Wire, which was dominant on Facebook.
00:02:50.000 And in response, Facebook basically shut down the political algorithm entirely.
00:02:55.000 They basically destroyed their political news algorithm in order to please the left.
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00:04:19.000 After 2020, when President Trump lost, things went a little bit into remission.
00:04:23.000 And then Mark Zuckerberg made the most fatal mistake.
00:04:27.000 He said he might consider voting for President Trump, and then he showed up at the inauguration.
00:04:31.000 And this was the sin.
00:04:32.000 I promise you, this movie would never have been made if it had not been for that last sin.
00:04:37.000 That is what is going on here.
00:04:38.000 And I don't agree with everything that Mark Zuckerberg does, but an entire movie targeting Zuckerberg as the root of all evil here is pretty astonishing.
00:04:46.000 And of course, it's Bill Burr and Jeremy Ellen White and Jeremy Strong and Mikey Madison.
00:04:54.000 A total Oscar bait play.
00:04:57.000 Very heavy handed stuff coming from Aaron Sorkin.
00:04:59.000 You can sense it.
00:05:02.000 The anxiety, depression of teenage girls got worse as a result of time spent on the platform.
00:05:07.000 Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.
00:05:10.000 I know they're easier enemies to make.
00:05:11.000 The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.
00:05:15.000 So, mafia would be an easier man to make.
00:05:16.000 The story, the internal documents.
00:05:18.000 This is a material violation of my NDA.
00:05:20.000 We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth.
00:05:22.000 We're not frightened of Congress.
00:05:23.000 We're post government around here.
00:05:25.000 Please, please let me quote that.
00:05:28.000 We have 102 hours to get everything.
00:05:30.000 She's going to get sued into small.
00:05:32.000 Pieces.
00:05:33.000 I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources.
00:05:36.000 Heart, I promise you, is imminent.
00:05:40.000 People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate.
00:05:44.000 I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore, Charlie.
00:05:46.000 Look around.
00:05:55.000 I don't know what the reckoning she's doing.
00:05:56.000 Aaron Sorkin is bringing the reckoning.
00:05:58.000 She's disrupting.
00:06:01.000 She's disrupting.
00:06:02.000 Oh my goodness.
00:06:02.000 Okay.
00:06:04.000 Now, again, I think there are a lot of critiques that can be made of social media.
00:06:07.000 If I could hit a red button today and make it all disappear retroactively, I would do it.
00:06:12.000 I think social media has been horrible for the brains of human beings.
00:06:15.000 I think that it has not fulfilled the promise that it was supposedly created to perform.
00:06:20.000 And I say this as an economic beneficiary of social media's existence.
00:06:25.000 With that said, Hollywood would not be doing this if they're not going to do this about Dario Amodi.
00:06:30.000 Okay, they're not.
00:06:31.000 They're not going to do this about any left wing, like openly left wing social media bro.
00:06:36.000 They would never make this movie about Jack Dorsey.
00:06:41.000 It is pretty amazing.
00:06:42.000 I think it's also worth noting what exactly Hollywood is doing with this film.
00:06:45.000 So, the basic idea here is that Facebook ignored a bunch of data that would have told them that teen girls in particular were being harmed by content over at Facebook.
00:06:56.000 Well, the truth is that Facebook actually has been one of the more responsible companies.
00:07:00.000 If you're going to get into what the data actually show about a wide variety of companies, TikTok is way worse than, for example, Facebook.
00:07:07.000 Facebook has spent Legitimately, millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars attempting to mitigate the harms that social media does to teenage girls.
00:07:16.000 They have a long track record of this.
00:07:18.000 So, for example, Meta, which is the parent company for Facebook, they automatically place users aged 13 to 17 into protective teen accounts, and that restricts who can message them.
00:07:27.000 It defaults their privacy settings to friends only.
00:07:30.000 They have global standards to hide sensitive material related to self harm and eating disorders and intense body image content.
00:07:37.000 The leak that is the subject of this particular movie, which is a condensation.
00:07:41.000 Of a bunch of leaks.
00:07:43.000 But the leaker in this particular case is somebody who alleged that basically there were higher ups who were trying to determine whether the cost outweighed the benefit in terms of certain mitigation techniques, that there was internal resistance to some of the features that were recommended.
00:07:57.000 But that is sort of normal business conversation.
00:07:59.000 Again, I'm not saying Facebook did everything perfectly here, but the basic idea here is that Mark Zuckerberg is somehow uniquely responsible for the evils of Facebook, which is itself a unique evil.
00:08:11.000 And that's not so true.
00:08:13.000 There are lots of social media sites.
00:08:14.000 At this point, I would say Facebook is actually one of the Least damaging of the sites that is out there in terms of social media.
00:08:23.000 Now, again, the movie is focusing on Zuckerberg as villain.
00:08:27.000 I think there are political reasons behind that.
00:08:29.000 I think they're not doing this about TikTok because if they did it about TikTok, they might piss off the Chinese market.
00:08:34.000 They do it about Facebook, and Zuckerberg has been pretty critical of the Chinese government.
00:08:38.000 There's always a big issue when you make a Hollywood film.
00:08:40.000 A huge percentage of Hollywood foreign sales now is the Chinese market.
00:08:44.000 So if you want to do Chinese work for them, then definitely pick on a company like Facebook and not a company like, say, TikTok.
00:08:50.000 Which has been substantially worse for the mental health of people.
00:08:54.000 You want to talk about the trans epidemic?
00:08:55.000 That was not happening on Facebook the same way that it was on TikTok.
00:08:59.000 So, again, there are a lot of politics here.
00:09:01.000 As far as the overall direction of the movie, so this movie is not, in fact, directed by David Fincher.
00:09:05.000 So, you can feel it in the trailer.
00:09:08.000 There's sort of a Fincher aesthetic that's always very cool and distant and clean.
00:09:12.000 And you don't feel that in the same way in this movie.
00:09:14.000 It feels almost TV movie ish, which Sorkin always sort of has the danger of running into because his movies are, I would say, 10% overwritten.
00:09:22.000 Again, I think some Sorkin is great, but I think too much Sorkin is over Sorkin'ing the thing.