Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg reveals why he no longer wants to be ‘associated’ with Mark Zuckerberg
Jesse Eisenberg, the star of The Social Network who famously played Mark Zuckerberg, has cut ties to the billionaire mogul.
Eisenberg is perhaps best known for his role in the film, which earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Despite this, Eisenberg has not been afraid to hit out at the Facebook co-creator.
The actor and director was on BBC’s Radio 4 Today show promoting his newest film A Real Pain, which received a Best Picture nomination, as well as a Best Original Screenplay nod for Eisenberg.
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When asked about Mark Zuckerberg, he said: “It's like this guy is... doing things that are problematic, taking away fact-checking.
"[There are] safety concerns. Making people who are already threatened in the world more threatened."
Meta, the company led by Zuckerberg behind Facebook and Instagram, announced recently that they would be doing away with independent fact-checking on both platforms.
Eisenberg went on to say: “These people have billions upon billions of dollars, like 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 hate. That's what I think... not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as 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."
Though Zuckerberg at one time was a critic of Donald Trump, the billionaire has seemingly made peace with the new American president.
Zuckerberg appeared front-and-centre at Trump's inauguration last month, with the Los Angeles Times saying he and other tech leaders have 'gone out of their way to position themselves in the president’s good graces, knowing he could help or hinder them in the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies'.
The decision from Meta to end independent, third-party fact-checking was slammed by former POTUS Joe Biden, who said: “I think it's really shameful, telling the truth matters, completely contrary to everything America's about.”
In an interview with Joe Rogan last month, Zuckerberg compared the fact-checking operation to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, saying: "I think people just felt like the fact checkers were too biased, not necessarily even so much in what they ruled... although sometimes I think people would disagree with that.
"A lot of the time, it was just what types of things they chose to even go and fact check in the first place. So I kind of think, after having gone through that whole exercise, it’s something out of, like, Nineteen Eighty-Four - one of these books, where it’s just like, it really is a slippery slope.
"And it just got to a point where it’s just 'OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States'."
He also said of Brexit and Trump’s first presidency: “I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time, we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds.”
Last week, President Trump and Meta agreed on a payment of £20m to settle a lawsuit following the ban of his accounts in the wake of the January 6 Capitol Riots.
LADbible has contacted Meta for comment.
Topics: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, BBC, Oscars, Film, TV and Film
Michael Slavin