Reel-life Mark Zuckerberg wants to stay away from real life Mark Zuckerberg, here's why

Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network

Actor Jesse Eisenberg, who played the role of Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film ‘The Social Network’, has said in an interview that he does not want to be associated with the social media mogul. In an interview with BBC Radio, the 'Zombieland' and 'Now You See Me' actor called into question Zuckerberg’s decision to replace third-party fact-checkers from Facebook and Instagram with the X-inspired “Community Notes” model which allows people on the platform to challenge the content.

“I don’t want to think of myself as associated with somebody like that,” Eisenberg said in the interview and called Zuckerberg’s actions “problematic”.

The 41-year old actor, who earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role’ for portraying the Meta CEO in ‘The Social Network’, is concerned about social media giant’s new policies hurting the marginalised groups.

Mark Zuckerberg has tried to justify his decision of scrapping the independent fact-checking program over “free expression”, and said last month that Meta has reached a point where “it’s just too many mistakes” and “too much censorship”.

Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta, notes in an official post that “the intention of the (fact checking) program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read” but that’s not how it has played out and that the experts too “have their own biases and perspectives”.

In the BBC interview, Eisenberg said that the Meta CEO’s policies were “making people who are already threatened in this world more threatened.” He suggested that Meta CEO and other tech billionaires are using their wealth to “curry favor with somebody who’s preaching hate.”