Natalie Portman says she’s never joined Facebook despite attending Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg

Actor was student with Zuckerberg during events dramatised in 2010 film The Social Network

Natalie Portman has revealed she’s never joined Facebook – despite attending Harvard with its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

The Thor actor told Australian talk show The Project that her decision to stay off the social media site has been guided in recent years by their business practices.

“You know, Facebook started at school when I was there,” she explained. “I didn’t join when I was there and I haven’t joined since.”

She continued: “What we’re learning is that all of these platforms that everyone is a part of need to have more responsibility baked in. In terms of that, they are a kind of publishing platform that [is] presenting information that people are taking as fact.”

In 2019, Portman said that she was a senior at Harvard when Zuckerberg, then a freshman student, first invented Facebook.

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“I went to school with no Facebook, no Instagram, no cameras on phones,” Portman said. “So I was really able to go about my business and not have it documented for public consumption. Which was really lucky ’cause, guess what? It’s good to make mistakes and do stupid things when you’re a teenager and young adult and not have it haunt you forever. So I was very lucky in missing that by a fraction. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for being very young.”

Portman is also referenced, if not by name, in The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 drama inspired by the making of Facebook.

One character in the film mentions that, thanks to Facebook, Zuckerberg has become the biggest name on a campus that includes “Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, future Olympians, and a movie star” – with the latter a secret reference to Portman.

In December, Portman revealed that she had been “sexualised” as a young actor in the spotlight, and subsequently altered her own public behaviour to combat it.