Jennifer Aniston has expressed her disdain for social media and its exploitative effects, saying: “It has taken down a huge portion of humanity.”
Aniston was speaking to Harper’s Bazaar to coincide with a new season of The Morning Show, the TV series in which she plays a TV presenter opposite Reese Witherspoon. Aniston, who has been the target of media and online gossip for decades, was withering in her criticism, saying: “I’m sure the guys who came up with [social media] thought it was a great idea and, yeah, congratulations on your billions, but it has taken down a huge portion of humanity.”
She also suggested that the treatment she received from tabloid and magazine gossip writers in the 1990s and 2000s, focusing on her relationship with her former husband, Brad Pitt, and her fertility issues, has simply moved online. “So now any schmuck can stay anonymous and write whatever the hell they want to write.”
Aniston also said she has regularly been the victim of deepfake images, a phenomenon that is reflected in a plotline in The Morning Show. “I catch things all the time,” she said. “Or friends send me things saying, ‘I don’t think this is you’, or ‘I don’t think you’re advertising this’, and I’ll send it to my lawyers so they can do a cease-and-desist. It’s just such a runaway train.”
She also outlined why she decided to publicly discuss her difficulties with conceiving children with an article in the Huffington Post in 2016. “[The media] didn’t know my story, or what I’d been going through over the past 20 years to try to pursue a family, because I don’t go out there and tell them my medical woes. That’s not anybody’s business. But there comes a point when you can’t not hear it – the narrative about how I won’t have a baby, won’t have a family, because I’m selfish, a workaholic. It does affect me – I’m just a human being. We’re all human beings. That’s why I thought, ‘What the hell?’”
She added: “The older I get, the less I care about correcting a narrative, because it will happen eventually. The news cycle is so fast, it just goes away. Of course, there are times when I feel that sense of justice – when something has been said that isn’t true and I need to right the wrong. And then I think, do I really?”
