Hate, polarization, and misinformation have become profitable assets for social media, whose algorithms maximize profits at the expense of damaging community, mental health, and democracy. Aaron Sorkin’s film *The Price of the Net* puts a face to human suffering and, based on the historic leak of internal Facebook documents in 2021, reveals the darkest side of a machine designed to promote the loss of empathy and dehumanization.

Sorkin’s film is a sequel to The Social Network (2010), in which, as screenwriter, he portrayed the purpose of a group of young Harvard geniuses, led by Mark Zuckerberg, to connect the world altruistically. More than a decade later, as director, he returns to the big screen with Price of the Net to show how that idyllic foundational project of social friendship has transformed into a cold and lucrative machine, geared towards instrumentalizing discord and commodifying the human psyche. The plot is based on the historic leak of thousands of internal Facebook documents in 2021, delving into the tech corporation’s Civic Integrity Department, where data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) discovers how the company deliberately ignores reports about the harmful effects of its algorithms. Determined not to be complicit in this ethical decline, Haugen secretly extracts the evidence and contacts Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a reporter for The Wall Street Journal . Together they embark on a risky battle to expose the so-called Facebook Files . This initiative clashes with the corporate coldness of Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) , who is prepared to protect his empire at any cost.

The hijacking of attention

The ethical turning point is revealed when Haugen discovers a shocking fact from the company’s own reports: the algorithm increases the reach of posts that provoke [this] by more than 64%.Outrage and hatred. The film documents how the analyst discovers that by promoting the lowest human emotions—resentment, polarization, and rage—users remain glued to the screen for much longer. For the company, this attention-grabbing translates directly into billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

Sorkin masterfully portrays how this lucrative algorithmic design exacts a tragic toll in the real world, transforming corporate profit into systematic human suffering. On one hand, he illustrates the devastating impact of the digital ecosystem on mental health, reflected in cyberbullying and the erosion of self-esteem in teenagers, exposed to destructive dynamics that the company itself knew caused harm. On the other hand, the film exposes the macro-ethical dimension of the problem: by deliberately incentivizing extremism to ensure infinite scrolling , the platform weakens community ties and the pillars of democracy, and instigates violence, revealing the true price of a network that prioritizes economic gain over social integrity.

The confirmation that the platform prioritizes monetization over the common good is made clear in a cynical measure: the swift dissolution of the Department of Civic Integrity after the 2020 US presidential election. Sorkin stages this moment with a cold, bureaucratic tension, showing how the corporation, once the scrutiny of the election period had passed, decided to dismantle the team whose sole function was to ensure truthfulness and curb hate speech. This represents a complete institutional abdication of moral responsibility. By eliminating the only internal ethical check to give free rein to the reactive algorithm, the company demonstrates that the dignity of its users is entirely dispensable if it stands in the way of maximizing its commercial profits.

In the film’s climax, the dissolution of this internal ethical counterbalance translates into one of the most disturbing collective consequences of our era : the storming of the United States Capitol. The director presents this event as the logical and inevitable result of a mass, orchestrated radicalization. To highlight this micro-scale dehumanization process, the film employs a brilliant circular narrative device through a young user. At the beginning of the film, she is presented as an ordinary citizen. However, after being exposed to a relentless barrage of hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, the young woman undergoes a radical psychological transformation. Her reappearance at the end of the film, actively participating in the violent mob that storms the Capitol, serves as a tragic visual metaphor for how digital manipulation can ultimately nullify conscience and free will.

The fallacious defense of pluralism

The film’s climax shifts to the halls of the United States Congress. Through time jumps, the New York filmmaker juxtaposes Frances Haugen’s historic and revealing final testimony before the Senate with Mark Zuckerberg’s rigged rehearsals for his appearance. Here, the great rhetorical paradox of Silicon Valley is laid bare: faced with accusations of spreading hate and violence,  the corporation systematically defends itself under the sacred pretext of preserving freedom of expression and avoiding censorship. However, the film starkly demonstrates that this supposed defense of pluralism is a deceptive facade. Far from protecting a fundamental human right, the deliberate absence of effective filters against hoaxes and disinformation is a financial strategy. Lies and conspiracy theories spread unchecked through digital channels because they are lucrative.

Before the senators, the data analyst made a devastating statement: “ Facebook products harm children, fuel division, and weaken our democracy.” In a powerful sequence, Haugen compared the tech crisis to harmful industries, reminding the court that “when we realized that tobacco companies were hiding the harm they were causing, the government acted.” Contrasting her warnings with corporate inaction, the engineer asserted that the platforms hide behind false dilemmas to maintain their status quo: “They want us to believe that we must choose between a network full of hate or losing freedom of expression.” Her testimony demonstrates that there is no miscalculation, but rather a conscious choice, since the company knows how to make its platforms safer but fails to implement the changes because it prioritizes its astronomical profits over the well-being of people.

Bioethical assessment

An analysis of *The Price of the Net* through the lens of personalist bioethics reveals a head-on collision between the practices of large technology corporations and the intrinsic dignity of the human being. The personalist model demands that the person always be the center, the beginning, and the end of any social development or structure, possessing an absolute value that prohibits their instrumentalization. However, the algorithmic machinery depicted in the film operates in the opposite direction: it reduces the psyche, emotions, and vulnerability of users to mere quantifiable and monetizable inputs. It is a market structure that degrades the ontological dignity of the person, transforming them into an object of mass consumption and behavioral manipulation.

This degradation directly impacts the principle of freedom and responsibility. For personalist bioethics, freedom is not blind autonomy, but a faculty oriented toward truth and linked to the moral responsibility for one’s actions. The film demonstrates that these platforms actively sabotage free will: by feeding users personalized misinformation bubbles, they nullify their capacity for critical judgment, limiting their self-determination. Paradoxically, while the corporation evades its social responsibility by hiding behind a false defense of freedom of expression, the figure of Frances Haugen emerges as the film’s ethical touchstone. Her decision to leak internal documents constitutes an exemplary act of conscientious objection and solidarity, underscoring how individual freedom acquires its true value when it protects the well-being and integrity of others.

Finally, the film exposes the systematic destruction of the principles of sociability and subsidiarity. This bioethical pillar establishes that social life must be built on mutual aid, justice, and the pursuit of the common good, recognizing that the well-being of society depends directly on the protection of each and every one of its members. The Price of the Net demonstrates how Silicon Valley’s business model operates in an antisocial manner by discovering that polarization and hatred yield greater profits than cohesion. The dissolution of the Department of Civic Integrity and the subsequent radicalization that culminates in the attack on the Capitol—embodied in the alarming transformation of the young user—are empirical proof of a breakdown in community. When an organization deliberately poisons interpersonal relationships and weakens democracy to maximize its profits, it destroys the social fabric and commits the greatest offense against people’s capacity to create loving, healthy, and peaceful bonds that foster cohesion.

As neuroscientist Natalia López Moratalla and María Font Arellano ^[1] masterfully explain , ethical awareness and moral judgment are not merely externally imposed cultural constructs, but an innate experience inscribed in our very neural architecture. The human brain naturally processes a “golden rule”—do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself—integrating emotions with reasoning, thus transforming this natural law into the true law of freedom. In contrast to the addictive and polarizing dynamics exposed in *The Price of the Net *, relational neurobiology reminds us that our human nature is made for connection and empathy, not for systematic conflict. Recovering and actively cultivating empathy in the digital environment therefore becomes an imperative bioethical necessity to protect our moral brain from the algorithms of discord, rescuing human dignity from a potential dehumanization.

Technical specifications

Original title: The Social Reckoning

Year: 2026

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Country: United States

Duration: 1h 52min.

Amparo Aygües . Master’s Degree in Bioethics from the Catholic University of Valencia. Member of the Bioethics Observatory

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[1] López Moratalla, N. and Font Arellano, M. (2026). The moral network. The brain before the ten commandments . Rialp