Former
Facebook executive: social media is ripping society apart
Chamath
Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth, expressed regret for his
part in building tools that destroy ‘the social fabric of how society works’
‘It is eroding the core foundations of how
people behave by and between each other,’ says former Facebook executive
Chamath Palihapitiya
Julia
Carrie Wong in San Francisco
Tuesday 12
December 2017 01.36 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 12 December 2017 01.38 GMT
A former
Facebook executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his work on “tools
that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”, joining a
growing chorus of critics of the social media giant.
Chamath
Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at Facebook before he left
the company in 2011, said: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that
we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no
cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.” The remarks, which were made at a
Stanford Business School event in November, were just surfaced by tech website
the Verge on Monday.
“This is
not about Russian ads,” he added. “This is a global problem ... It is eroding
the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”
Palihapitiya’s
comments last month were made one day after Facebook’s founding president, Sean
Parker, criticized the way that the company “exploit[s] a vulnerability in
human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop” during an
interview at an Axios event.
Parker had
said that he was “something of a conscientious objector” to using social media,
a stance echoed by Palihapitaya who said that he was now hoping to use the
money he made at Facebook to do good in the world.
“I can’t
control them,” Palihapitaya said of his former employer. “I can control my
decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’
decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit.”
He also
called on his audience to “soul search” about their own relationship to social
media. “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed,” he
said. “It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you’re going to
give up, how much of your intellectual independence.”
Social
media companies have faced increased scrutiny over the past year as critics
increasingly link growing political divisions across the globe to the handful
of platforms that dominate online discourse.
Many
observers attributed the unexpected outcomes of the 2016 US presidential
election and Brexit referendum at least in part to the ideological echo chambers
created by Facebook’s algorithms, as well as the proliferation of fake news,
conspiracy mongering, and propaganda alongside legitimate news sources in
Facebook’s news feeds.
The company
only recently acknowledged that it sold advertisements to Russian operatives
seeking to sow division among US voters during the 2016 election.
Facebook
has also faced significant criticism for its role in amplifying anti-Rohingya
propaganda in Myanmar amid suspected ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.
Palihapitiya
referenced a case from the Indian state of Jharkhand this spring, when false
WhatsApp messages warning of a group of kidnappers led to the lynching of seven
people. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.
“That’s
what we’re dealing with,” Palihapitiya said. “Imagine when you take that to the
extreme where bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do
anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.”
Facebook
did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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