The Social Reckoning – when will it really happen?

Going to see The Social Reckoning I knew what to expect from the plot, but I didn’t expect to leave frustrated and thinking "What has really changed?"

The film takes us back to 2021, when the whistleblower Frances Haugen shared tens of thousands of pages of internal documents from Facebook with journalists and regulators. They clearly showed the serious harms threatening the lives of young people that had been fuelled by the decisions and choices made by the social media platform.

Watching the film, I was back in that autumn reading the details in the Facebook Files as they dropped and then joining virtual meetings to work out what they meant for the children the NSPCC supports.

What was shocking then – and what the film spells out – was the company knew about the dangers. Its own researchers had found Instagram made some teenage girls feel worse about their bodies and that knowledge sat in slide decks while the product continued to be built to keep them scrolling.

Scenes in the film depict the slick offices of Facebook and a neon sign with the company’s internal motto: 'Move fast and break things'. That was meant to be about code but somewhere along the way the things being broken became children.

Five years later, we are still bearing the brunt of tech companies' arrogance. The harms the film explores don’t feel like a distant memory, but an everyday reality for children and young people, all too familiar to parents and families across the country.

At the NSPCC, we hear every day from children whose lives are turned upside down by harms on social media and online platforms such as gaming sites and AI chatbots. Last year, Childline carried out over 4,300 counselling sessions around online harms. Our research has found there are around 100 child sexual abuse material crimes logged by police forces every day.

We have been campaigning for a safer online world since 2018, demanding laws that make children’s safety a priority for tech companies. Progress has been made. In the UK, the Online Safety Act is making a difference and new regulatory rules to protect children have been in force since July 2025 with fines issued to tech companies when they’ve failed to comply with those new rules. In the US, a jury found Meta (the parent company of Facebook launched after the 2021 scandal) negligent for designing platforms that hooked a young user. None of that seemed possible five years ago. It has happened because whistleblowers, parents, survivors and campaigners refused to let it drop.

But the culture the film shows hasn’t gone away – it’s moved on to new technology. Last year it emerged that Meta’s internal rules had allowed its AI chatbots to have 'romantic or sensual' conversations with children. The fix came after headlines and outrage – not as the product was designed. Build, launch, wait for fall out, patch. The same pattern Frances Haugen exposed but now this isn’t a feed it’s a companion that talks back, remembers and sounds like a friend. When you add AI-generated abuse imagery, livestreaming and encrypted messaging into the mix, the risks are even higher than in 2021, while products reach them faster than ever. As technology rapidly accelerates, new threats to children and their families will continue to emerge as long as tech companies refuse to put children’s safety at the heart of their businesses.

This can’t be allowed to continue.

The UK Government has committed to building on current laws by introducing a social media ban for under 16s. Now, we need to see them move fast and go further.

There’s a real risk that children who get around the ban will face even more dangerous online spaces and avoid seeking support for fear of having ‘broken the rules’. AI chatbots aren’t up to the job of keeping children safe, and we know too many online platforms continue to rely on addictive design features to keep children hooked. Companies need to design their products so safety is built in and they are acting before – not after – widespread harm and damage is done. Big tech needs to be held to account – by Government making sure safety by design is a legal requirement, by Ofcom using every power it has to enforce that and by all of us continuing to stand up for children.

The real reckoning is not the one depicted on screen, but whether tech companies will finally understand and take responsibility for these problems. We know there is much more tech companies must do to make their services safe for children. The film shows what one person can start. Imagine what thousands of us working together can do? The NSPCC will be there to make sure that social reckoning finally happens, and you can add your voice by joining us as a campaigner.