by WorldTribune Staff, December 11, 2017
A former vice president at Facebook said he feels “tremendous guilt” about helping to create the Internet behemoth and recommends people take a “hard break” from social media.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business: “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”
The former Facebook vice president went on to say that “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created [including the hearts, likes, and thumbs up of various social media channels] are destroying how society works. [There’s] no civil discourse, no cooperation; [only] misinformation, mistruth.
“And it’s not an American problem – this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Palihapitiya noted an incident in which seven innocent men in India were lynched after a hoax about kidnappings spread through WhatsApp: “That’s what we’re dealing with. 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.”
Palihapitiya added that, when it comes to social media, his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”
The entire discussion at Stanford Graduate School of Business can be seen here
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