This has been an eventful year for journalist and author Jeff Horwitz ’03.
In May, along with fellow Reuters reporter Engen Tham, he won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in the Beat Reporting category for his “inventive and revelatory reporting on Meta,” which detailed the social media company’s willingness to expose users, including children, to scams and AI manipulation.
Horwitz, who lives in the Bay Area, says he “never expected to be in contention” for the prize and was “gratified and delighted.” He also admits that winning the award is “a pretty strong recipe for some incoming imposter syndrome” as he contemplates where to focus his reporting gaze next.
This fall, his 2023 book Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets, which also focuses on how Meta placed profits above civic conscience, hits movie screens as the basis for The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network. The new movie, released on October 9, dramatizes the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen as reported by Horwitz in “The Facebook Files” for The Wall Street Journal.
As Horwitz recounts, he was first approached by Sony before the book was even published. “These things are wildly speculative,” he says, and it was only last year that it started seeming like it might happen. Conversations with Sorkin ensued, though Horwitz is quick to point out that while the movie is inspired by his book, Sorkin “worked with the story as he wanted to tell it, and that is just fine by me.”
Jeremy Allen White, known to many as Chef Carmy in the popular comedy-drama The Bear, plays Horwitz, with Mikey Madison (Anora) in the role of Frances Haugen and Jeremy Strong (Succession) as Mark Zuckerberg.
The experience of being played by a Hollywood actor, Horwitz says, has been “bizarre” and he finds it “deeply amusing to be played by an extremely sexy man.”
“The Hollywood stuff as a whole has been interesting and fun to see,” he says, but he has tried to keep “a moderate distance.” Meanwhile, new topics—some related to climate change, some around AI—vie for his journalistic attention.