Filmmaker and historian Ken Burns has called Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Zuckerberg, “an enemy of the state” and added that he “belongs in jail.”
Burns made the comments in the “Sway” podcast by The New York Times. He was promoting a new film he did about Muhammad Ali during the podcast. He was later asked if a particular tech figure could be as culturally significant as Ali, a boxing legend.
He responded, “I mean I hope Zuckerberg is in jail by then. This is an enemy of the state, and I mean the United States of America. He doesn’t give a sh*t about us, the United States. He knows he can transcend it. He can get away to any place. And so it’s just about filthy lucre, that’s it.”
Aside from Zuckerberg, Burns also took a jab at Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“Because these people — and Sheryl is a complicit — the Nuremberg of this, is if it ever happens, which it won’t, will be pretty interesting. The way that we’ve been able to temporize and say, ‘Oh, it’s okay, we’ll just go a little bit further,’ right?” he said. The host of the podcast moved on to another topic after Burns made these statements.
Facebook has not commented on Burns’ recent statements against Zuckerberg and Sandberg.
Burns has been commenting on a lot of topics in the past weeks. Last month, he talked about the current climate of the United States as the “most fraught time” in history.
Burns also talked about how the United States is in dire straits because of his beliefs regarding COVID-19 misinformation and the battles over election laws.
“We’re at this desperate place. The convergence of all those viruses, the side effects of the misinformation and the paranoia and the lying, voter suppression. And then the rewriting of our history are saying that we’re not interested in facts. We’re not interested in the truth. We’re not interested in the many varied voices that make us up,” he had said.
