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The Verge's Installer newsletter highlights a new Facebook-focused film starring Jeremy Strong and written by Aaron Sorkin, along with Amazon's newly launched Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. The edition also rounds up other recommended shows, games, gadgets and a book about the AI industry.
Aaron Sorkin's film depicts Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager, as she leaks internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and testifies before Congress, highlighting her efforts to expose platform issues. The movie combines real events with some timeline adjustments, notably placing key moments on January 6, 2021, instead of their actual dates.
Aaron Sorkin tells WIRED he spent years fielding pitches for a follow-up to The Social Network before finding his angle: former Facebook engineer Frances Haugen, who leaked internal documents to journalist Jeff Horwitz. Those documents became the Wall Street Journal's 2021 'Facebook Files' series, which detailed the company's internal knowledge of harms ranging from hate speech to body image issues that it allegedly downplayed while prioritizing growth.
Aaron Sorkin has written and directed 'The Social Reckoning,' a companion film to 'The Social Network' built around The Wall Street Journal's reporting with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. The movie traces Haugen's time at the company and uses her account to show how its pursuit of growth turned it into a societal hazard, with Mark Zuckerberg a prominent but secondary figure.
A hobby project called GET Together implements an entire social network—posting, replying, hearting and deleting—using only HTTP GET requests instead of POST. Posts are created by hitting URLs like /post?name=alice&text=hello, with an optional session cookie enabling later deletion, and a /feed endpoint returning JSON. The system includes basic profanity and crypto-content moderation, plus a reporting mechanism for abuse review.
A federal judge in Delaware ruled that startup Operation Bluebird cannot use the name 'Twitter' for its new social network, siding with Elon Musk's X on that trademark. But the judge also found X likely abandoned rights to the word 'tweet' and the bluebird logo, letting the startup relaunch its site as Tweet.app and open to users, drawing over 172,000 handle requests before launch.
Aaron Sorkin has written and is releasing 'The Social Reckoning' through Sony Pictures on October 9, a follow-up to his 2010 film 'The Social Network' that examines how Facebook has evolved into a driver of extremism and division. The film's trailer debuted the same week Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion in penalties tied to claims its platform harmed children.