Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in the hit movie “The Social Network,” is no longer friends with the businessman.
Eisenberg is likely best known for his part in the movie, which got him a Star Award nod for Best Actor. In spite of this, Eisenberg has not been afraid to criticize the co-founder of Facebook.
The actor and director was on BBC’s Radio 4 Today to promote his newest movie, A Real Pain, which was nominated for Best Picture and Eisenberg for Best Original Screenplay.
After being asked about Mark Zuckerberg, he said, “It’s like this guy is… doing bad things and taking away fact-checking.”
Concerns about safety have been raised. Putting more danger on people who are already in danger in the world.
Meta, the company that runs Facebook and Instagram and is run by Zuckerberg, recently said that they would no longer have independent fact-checking on either site.
Eisenberg then asked, “What are these people doing with billions and billions of dollars? That’s more money than any person has ever have.”
“Oh, they’re doing it to get along with someone who preaches hate,” I said. That’s what I think… not as much like a movie character. I see it as a husband whose wife teaches disability law in New York and lives for her kids. This year will be a little harder for everybody.
Zuckerberg used to be against Donald Trump, but now the millionaire seems to be getting along with the new president.
The Los Angeles Times said that Zuckerberg 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.” He was in the front row at Trump’s inauguration last month.
The move by Meta to stop independent, third-party fact-checking was criticized by former President Joe Biden, who said, “I think it’s really shameful, telling the truth matters, and it goes against everything America stands for.”
In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg said that the fact-checking operation was like the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. He said, “I think people just felt like the fact checkers were too biased, not necessarily so much in what they ruled… although sometimes I think people would disagree with that.”
“A lot of the time, it was the things they chose to check for accuracy in the first place.” After doing that practice, I feel like I’m in one of those books from 1984, where things start to go wrong quickly.
“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 this about Brexit and Trump’s first term in office: “I think those were the first two times we really had to deal with this huge, huge institutional pressure to start censoring content on ideological grounds.”
Last week, President Trump and Meta decided to pay £20 million to end a lawsuit that started when his accounts were banned after the Capitol Riots on January 6.
