Who Owns the Data? 'The Social Reckoning', Blockchain, and the Unequal Promise of Platform Power

I do not merely call goals; I listen for the silence before the net ripples. On Friday, sitting in a hall in Rajshahi, I was waiting for a different kind of silence — the one that falls across a screen when a person realises the data pooled in their hands is quietly steering the daily decisions of millions. The film is called 'The Social Reckoning'. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, it stars Jeremy Allen White, Mikey Madison and Wunmi Mosaku, with Jeremy Strong appearing as Mark Zuckerberg. The stadium breathes before the first whistle, and I am still learning its language — this film is much the same, throwing an uncomfortable question before it has even begun. Walking out of the hall, I felt I had been watching different versions of the same story my whole life. On a football pitch I have seen how live data — every second of positioning, every pass probability — has seeped into the game. And a large share of that data ends up in the betting market. This stream of live data, fed to gambling companies, is the darkest side of sports datafication; I had thought it many times but never said it plainly. 'The Social Reckoning' forced me to say it, because what the film shows is the story of a much larger field than football. The questions the cast raise in their AFP interviews are, in one sense, familiar. How much power should technology companies accumulate, and who answers for it? In Wunmi Mosaku's words, the film raises questions about the influence of technology companies and about regulation. This is not science fiction. In 2026, the so-called 'Facebook Files' investigation published by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the platform's own internal research had documented the effects on its users. Those findings still circulate on regulators' tables around the world. The film arrives in cinemas on Friday, just as the global debate over platform regulation surges again. This is where blockchain enters. The debate usually settles into two poles — state regulation on one side, corporate freedom on the other. But a third path has long been argued by the blockchain camp. Their case is simple: the problem is concentrated power, so the answer should be decentralisation. User data stays with the user, identity becomes self-sovereign, and the social graph runs on open protocols rather than behind one company's closed doors. Data ownership, verifiable proof and on-chain records — these three ideas are genuinely compelling, because they touch the question of accountability directly. Let me speak from my own experience. As a football commentator I have watched, year after year, how quickly a goal's statistics travel — from which source to where, who verifies it, and who does not. The moment a source becomes murky, the line between rumour and fact dissolves. Blockchain's promise is relevant precisely here: if the origin of information is immutably recorded, the room for forgery shrinks. Whether it is sports data or a social media newsfeed, a verifiable source at least lets the user know what they are being fed. But there is a large gap in that promise, and I do not want to pass over it in silence. Decentralisation does not, by itself, create accountability. When a central owner steps away from a system, responsibility often evaporates — no one is to blame, because there is no 'one'. A token-driven attention economy builds a new kind of gamble, in which a user's time and attention become tradable assets. And the power that accumulates with validators or large holders is often no more transparent than that of the old intermediaries. The film itself falls into a trap. It frames the story around one person's moral crisis — a founder, his ego, his decisions. But the real problem of platform power lies not in individual character but in systemic incentive. The profit calculus, the advertising model, the competition for attention — this structure can push even an honest person down the wrong road. So swapping the villain does not end the story. In the same way, it is a simplification to think transparency arrives simply because blockchain removes the centre. The transfer market is a poem written in rumours, and I read it with a broken heart — the technology market is no less rumour-prone. So what is the path? I think the question is no longer 'regulation or decentralisation'. The question is: wherever power sits, who keeps its accounts? In football I learned that the video assistant referee did not change the rules — it kept the burden of decision on human shoulders. The same should hold for platforms. Let data ownership return to users, let source code stay open, let transaction records be verifiable — but alongside that, let there be a clear structure of accountability. Football is the only language where a pause can be louder than a roar. 'The Social Reckoning' uses that pause to try to build a roar. The architects of blockchain now face exactly the same question: will they simply remove the centre, or will they write a new address for responsibility? That answer has not been written yet. And history says that a question answered in haste is usually answered wrongly.