The Social Reckoning’s Real Ending: What Happened to Facebook, Frances Haugen, and Jeff Horwitz?

The Social Reckoning concludes with cards that tell us: The Wall Street Journal published its 17-part series, The Facebook Files, Facebook changed its name to Meta, Haugen testified internationally and appeared on the cover of Time, many people sued Facebook, Jeff Horwitz won the Pulitzer Prize, Meta no longer fact-checks anything, and 43% of adults get their news from Facebook. 

I had many other questions. Like what is Frances Haugen doing now? What was the public reaction to The Facebook Files? How did Zuckerberg react? What has Jeff Horwitz written about since? 

This is a comprehensive breakdown of everything that happened after Haugen exposed Facebook in 2021. 

What happened after The Social Reckoning ends

The Wall Street Journal published The Facebook Files on September 13, 2021. Haugen identified herself as the whistleblower on October 3. Her testimony happened on October 5. 

How did Mark Zuckerberg respond? 

Zuckerberg responded to Frances Haugen’s testimony the day it happened, October 5, 2021. How? Through a 1,300-word Facebook post.

He played the victim.

“I know it’s frustrating to see the good work we do get mischaracterized…but I believe that over the long term if we keep trying to do what’s right and delivering experiences that improve people’s lives, it will be better for our community and our business.”

It’s crazy that he can write something like that. Psychotic, even. A few paragraphs earlier he dropped this amazingly delusional quote: 

“The research actually demonstrates that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced. In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal—including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues—more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.”

Zuckerberg has not commented about The Social Reckoning. 

How did the public react?

In November 2021, a few months after the publication of Ihe Facebook Files, Axios ran a story about the public response. Their conclusion? “For now, this controversy is mainly of interest to the media and lawmakers.” 

Axios didn’t find any real spikes on search or Google Trends. That extended to social media. “WSJ’s most-engaged story from its Facebook investigations ranked 48th in social media interactions among all of the publication’s stories since March…” Their last note was about Meta’s stock decline having more to do with “Apple’s crackdown on targeted ads” than the whistleblowing. 

A nationwide investigation into Meta

November 2021: Attorneys general across the country launched a bipartisan investigation into Meta Platforms over allegations it was “providing and promoting its social media platform—Instagram—to children and young adults despite knowing that such use is associated with physical and mental health harms. Attorneys general across the country are examining whether the company violated state consumer protection laws and put the public at risk.” 

October 2023: The coalition filed a “federal lawsuit against Meta for harming young people’s mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis.” 

33 states were part of the federal suit. Eight more, along with D.C., filed at the state level.

August 2026: Meta settled the federal lawsuit for up to $17.1 billion, $12.1 billion guaranteed. “This is the largest settlement reached with a single company in the history of the Office of the Attorney General.” As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to a daily usage limit for minors, overnight restrictions, limited notifications, stronger age-verification systems, and independent auditing.

Florida is still pursuing individual cases against Meta. Meta settled with Texas for more than $1 billion. New Mexico didn’t settle but won a judgment for $942 million. 

What about Facebook’s radicalization issues?

What’s strange to me is that most of The Social Reckoning focuses on Facebook’s radicalization issues. That’s probably been the thing least affected by Haugen’s whistleblowing. 

There were four lawsuits relevant to Haugen’s revelations about Facebook’s algorithms and recommendation systems. 

• Underwood Jacobs v. Meta Platforms
• M.P. v. Meta Platforms
• Patterson v. Meta Platforms
• Doe 1 v. Meta Platforms

Courts tossed three of the four cases, all citing Section 230 as protecting platforms from liability regarding third-party content. I can’t find any updates on the Underwood Jacobs case, just news stories from when it was filed in 2022. 

In May 2020, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman published the 64% story. Three months later, Facebook announced restrictions for extremist groups. Meta’s last update (October 17, 2022) detailed the removal of specifically militarized social movements and QAnon. The totals:

• 8,400 pages
• 32,800 groups
• 1,040 events
• 127,000 Facebook profiles
• 47,700 Instagram profiles

In 2024, WIRED ran a story saying many groups had been rebuilt. Many were using Facebook to recruit and funnel people to their private channels. 

WIRED has continued the coverage of extremist groups on Facebook, including a story from 2026 about the “New Era of Militia Influencers”. 

So while Haugen’s whistleblowing contributed to some pretty big changes regarding how children use social media, the radicalization issue persists. 

What happened to Frances Haugen?

Haugen moved to Puerto Rico. She’s married and has a daughter. 

In 2023, she published The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook. 

She has a nonprofit called Beyond the Screen. “Beyond the Screen brings technical expertise and insider experience to the growing ecosystem of checks and balances needed to make social platforms safer, more transparent, and more accountable.”

Beyond the Screen’s lists its previous projects as: creating a practical map of platform harms, establishing a data-access standard to evaluate platform risks and progress, and building a tool for testing the impact of design choices on online dynamics. 

In June of 2026, Haugen talked to El País. 

Question: It’s been five years since the leak. How would you describe Meta’s evolution since then?

Answer: During the first two years, it seemed they had gotten the message. A month after the leak, they announced they would double down on safety. And they did. They hired a lot of people and built a lot of systems. But then Elon Musk came along, bought X, and fired its whole safety and content-moderation team. He showed that there weren’t consequences for not investing in safety. In a very short time, the industry as a whole made a radical turn. Company after company followed Elon’s lead. So I would say we may be worse off today than when I leaked the documents. We have not fully used the powers of tools like the Digital Services Act [DSA, the EU regulation to create a safer, more transparent online environment] or other systems that would allow us to put pressure on these platforms.

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A post shared by Frances Haugen (@frances.haugen)

What happened to Jeff Horwitz?

I can’t really find personal info on Jeff Horwitz. Which makes sense, as I imagine he has some enemies. Google thinks he’s Jeff Horowitz and married to actor Brittany Ishibashi. 

Like Haugen, Horwitz released a book in 2023: Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets. It’s what inspired The Social Reckoning. 

While Social Reckoning says Horwitz won a Pulitzer Prize, it wasn’t for The Facebook Files. In 2025, Horwitz moved from the Wall Street Journal to Reuters. 

There, he and Engen Tham continued to investigate Facebook. Six articles became the body of work that won them the 2026 Pulitzer. 

• Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home.
• Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info
• Meta created “playbook” to fend of pressure to crack down on scammers, documents show
• Meta’s “Trusted Experts” helped me run scam ads on Facebook and Instagram
• Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue
• Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Horwitz was just on the On Assignment podcast and talked in detail about the film and the story behind the film. 

Per New Mexico, Meta didn’t take down that wildly inappropriate and illegal content that she was sent. Even when she reported it. Instead, Meta’s systems noticed her rapid follower growth and suggested she set up a professional account with access to monetization features.

— Jeff Horwitz (@JeffHorwitz) December 6, 2023

Did Facebook really remove fact-checking?

April 2025: Meta disbanded third-party fact-checking. Specifically in the United States. They replaced it with a community notes system that’s similar to Elon’s Twitter. 

August: Washington Post journalist Geoffrey Fowler spent four months testing the system. He proposed 65 notes. Facebook published three (4.6%). These were for fabricated images, AI-generated content, and debunked rumors. 

September: Meta published data on the notes system. 

• 70,000 contributors
• 15,000 notes written
• 6% published 

On the one hand, we don’t know the quality of those 15,000 notes. On the other hand, 6% feels pathetic.

March 2026: Meta’s Oversight Board said the notes system had three problems: low publication totals, corrections arriving too late, and the potential for communities to manipulate/obstruct the consensus process. 

So while the idea of Community Notes isn’t necessarily a bad one, Meta’s implementation makes it seem like they don’t truly care about fact-checking so much as having a mechanism they can gesture towards when questioned.