Keanu Reeves did not say ‘humanity is showing signs of breaking free from the matrix’

A number of posts on Facebook, shared hundreds of times, falsely claim that actor Keanu Reeves said that “humanity is showing signs of breaking free from the matrix”. 

The lengthy alleged quote from the star of the Matrix franchise goes on to claim that “the human race has been reduced to slavery for thousands of years” and that society has been “been kept in mental prison by dark elites and secret societies”.

The concept of being in “the matrix” is the idea that the world as we experience it is not real. 

Full Fact could find no record on a legitimate news site of Mr Reeves ever having made such a claim.  

As fact checking site Snopes has previously written, the quote can be traced back to an article published in 2018 on the site YourNewsWire.com (now rebranded as News Punch), which has a track record of publishing false information. 

One of the Facebook posts claims that Mr Reeve’s comments are regarding “the current situation”. This is inconsistent with the evidence that his false quote first appeared online four years ago.