Jesse Eisenbergdoesn’t even want to be Facebook friends with Mark Zuckerberg.
The “Social Network” star told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program Tuesday that just because he played the Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder in a movie, he doesn’t ally himself in any way with Zuckerberg — and was eager to distance himself as much as possible from the billionaire.
“I haven’t been following [Zuckerberg’s] life trajectory, partly because I don’t … when I think of myself as associated with somebody like that, it’s not like I played a great golfer and now people think I’m a great golfer. It’s this guy that’s doing things that are problematic,” Eisenberg said. “Taking away fact-checking and safety concerns, making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened.”
Last month, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was dumping its independent fact-checking program because the system had become “too politically biased.”
Instead, he said Facebook and Instagram would now have to rely on “community notes” like on Elon Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter. This means that Zuckerberg has decided to pass the responsibility of fact-checking the accuracy of posts on Facebook and Instagram to its users instead of using independent third parties.
In an accompanying video to the announcement, Zuckerberg declared it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression.”
During his BBC Radio interview, Eisenberg also seemed to express disgust with Zuckerberg for aligning himself with President Donald Trump, having attended Trump’s inauguration and donating $1 million to his inauguration fund through Meta.
“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.’ I’m a human being,” Eisenberg said. “And you read these things and people have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed, and like, what are they doing with it? They’re doing it to curry favor with somebody who’s preaching hateful things?”
“So to me, that’s what I think of. But I think of that not as a person who played [him] in a movie,” he continued. “I think of it as somebody who’s 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.”
Eisenberg is currently on a media blitz thanks to his latest film, last year’s “A Real Pain.” The movie, which he wrote, directed and starred in, was nominated for several Oscars. So, he’s been asked a lot of questions about his feelings on Zuckerberg, who he played in the 2010 Oscar-winning “The Social Network,” and tech billionaires in general.
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Last month, during an appearance on Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” Eisenberg was asked about his thoughts on “tech bros” — and responded with a question of his own directed at them.
“If you’re so rich and powerful, why are you not just spending your days doing good things for the world?” he asked.
“And so when I watch these like incredibly powerful people, I just think like, wait, why are you not spending your day helping people?” Eisenberg added. “Why are you like getting mired into this weird stuff ― stuff I don’t really understand ― and taking, you know, privacy concerns away, hurting people who are already hurting, marginalized people?”