Jesse Eisenberg says he wants to distance himself from Mark Zuckerberg.
The actor and film-maker, 41, received an Oscar nomination for playing the Facebook and Meta chief in 2010 movie The Social Network, but 15 years on says he finds some of Zuckerberg’s recent actions “problematic”.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” on Tuesday, Eisenberg admitted that he hasn’t been following the tech giant’s “life trajectory, partly because I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that.”
“It’s not like I played a great golfer or something and now people think I’m a great golfer,” he continued. “It’s like this guy that’s doing things that are problematic - taking away fact-checking and safety concerns, making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened.”
On January 7, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be replacing its fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram with a “community notes” model similar to Elon Musk’s X.
He said that Meta’s fact-checking had led to “too many mistakes and too much censorship” and was “too politically biased.”
After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Zuckerberg met with him at his Florida bolthole Mar-a-Lago and Meta donated $1 million to his inaugural fund alongside other tech giants. Zuckerberg also attended Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Drawn on Zuckerberg’s recent actions, Eisenberg - whose latest film A Real Pain is up for best original screenplay at next month’s Oscars - said: “I’m concerned just as a person who reads a newspaper. I don’t think about, ‘Oh, I played the guy in the movie and therefore…’ It’s just, I’m a human being and you read these things and these people have billions upon billions of dollars, more money than any human person has ever amassed. And what are they doing with it? Oh, they’re doing it to curry favour with somebody who’s preaching hateful things.”
He further clarified that he holds these beliefs “not as a person who played [him] in a movie,” but “as just somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York, and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.”
