Jesse Eisenberg Says He Doesn't Want to Be Associated With Mark Zuckerberg After Playing Him in 'The Social Network'
Jesse Eisenberg is making it clear that he wants to distance himself from Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
During an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today show, Eisenberg admitted he has deliberately avoided keeping up with Zuckerberg's career.
"I don't want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that," the 41-year-old stated.
Eisenberg, who earned an Academy Award nomination for portraying Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network, explained that playing Zuckerberg was not like portraying a celebrated athlete, where people might assume he shares their skills. Instead, he noted, "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."
In early January, Zuckerberg, 40, announced that Meta would shift its fact-checking policies on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with a "community notes" system similar to the one used on Elon Musk's X platform.
The billionaire defended the decision by arguing that Meta's previous policies had caused "too many mistakes and too much censorship" and had become "too politically biased" in a video.
Per CBS News, following Donald Trump's 2024 presidential election victory, Zuckerberg met with him at Mar-a-Lago, and Meta contributed $1 million to his inaugural fund, alongside other major tech firms.
Zuckerberg was also present at Trump's inauguration on January 20.
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Expressing his unease about these developments, Eisenberg remarked, "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 favor with somebody who's preaching hateful things."
Eisenberg emphasized that his perspective is not influenced by having played Zuckerberg in a film but comes from his personal life.
"Not as a person who played [him] in a movie," he clarified, "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."
