Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about
the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice
president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the
company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping
apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at
Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term,
dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society
works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts,
likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation,
mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians
ads. This is a global problem.”
He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching
of seven innocent people. “That’s what we’re dealing with,” said
Palihapitiya. “And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors
can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s
just a really, really bad state of affairs.” He says he tries to use
Facebook as little as possible, and that his children “aren’t allowed to
use that shit.” He later adds, though, that he believes the company
“overwhelmingly does good in the world.”
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