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Former Facebook Exec: Social Media is ‘Ripping Apart’ Society
https://nypost.com/2017/12/11/former-facebook-exec-social-media-is-ripping-apart-society/
Yet another former Facebook executive has come forward to confess that he helped create a monster.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and later became its vice president for user growth, said that he and the company’s founders “have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”
The engineer-turned-investor added that he feels “tremendous guilt” for the impact Facebook has had on the world, and said that his kids don’t have profiles on the social network.
“They’re not allowed to use this ****,” he said.
Palihapitiya is the latest Facebook alum to admit regrets about their role building the company. Last month, Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, admitted he was “something of a conscientious objector” to the social networking giant.
Parker said Facebook is designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology” to get its users addicted.
Facebook “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker told Axios in early November. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
The bashing from Palihapitiya came at a talk given at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Palihapitiya admitted to the audience that he has been off Facebook and other social networks “for years.”
He said that the way people interact on social networks — through likes and retweets and shares — has become a plague on the way people communicate with each other.
Palihapitiya added that he resents that Facebook programs its users behaviors, and makes them “give up … intellectual independence.” He said it has become a platform “where bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything [they] want.”
From fake news stories flooding feeds in the US, to dictatorial regimes in the Philippines, Turkey and Kenya using Facebook to target dissent, Facebook is lately catching heat for its role in politics worldwide.
“We are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other,” he said. “And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore.”
Palihaitiya said that when Facebook was still in its early stages, there were discussions about the sort of impact the platform could have.
“I think in the back, deep, deep recesses [of our minds], we kind of knew something bad could happen,” Palihapitiya said. “But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he continued. “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.”
Facebook Responds to Former VP Who Said Social Media is Destroying Society
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/12...troying-society-response-chamath-palihapitiya
By Chris Welch on December 12, 2017 12:20 pm
Facebook has taken the unusual step of directly responding to a former employee who recently excoriated the biggest social networks for “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” And the company’s retort might surprise some people. Facebook isn’t outright dismissing or rejecting the claims of Chamath Palihapitiya, its former vice president of user growth. Instead, the underlining message seems to be that the Facebook of today is a far cry from the company he once worked for, and his perceptions are out-of-date.
“Chamath has not been at Facebook for over six years,” a company spokesperson said. “When Chamath was at Facebook we were focused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebook around the world. Facebook was a very different company back then and as we have grown we have realized how our responsibilities have grown too.”
Facebook points to its “work and research with outside experts and academics” to get a better grasp on the effects that come with our attachment to social media, which for many people has only grown more deep-seated and compulsive with time. The company claims it uses those learnings throughout the product development process. “We are willing to reduce our profitability to make sure the right investments are made,” Facebook says.
In November, CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to unequivocally stress that point by telling investors “I’m dead serious about this. Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profit.” The company has pledged to devote more resources towards combatting false news dissemination and other misuses of its platform. 1.3 billion people use Facebook every day.
Palihapitiya’s critical remarks drew immediate and widespread attention in the media and were printed on the front page of the UK’s Daily Mail. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said. The former Facebook VP, who worked for the company between 2007 and 2011, urged people to consider a “hard break” from social media.
“No civil discourse, no cooperation. Misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads,” Palihapitiya said. “This is a global problem.” He later attempted to balance his denunciation of social media by adding that Facebook “overwhelmingly does good in the world.”
Facebook’s entire reply follows below.
Chamath has not been at Facebook for over six years. When Chamath was at Facebook we were focused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebook around the world. Facebook was a very different company back then and as we have grown we have realized how our responsibilities have grown too. We take our role very seriously and we are working hard to improve. We’ve done a lot of work and research with outside experts and academics to understand the effects of our service on well-being, and we’re using it to inform our product development. We are also making significant investments more in people, technology, and processes, and — as Mark Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call — we are willing to reduce our profitability to make sure the right investments are made.
thoughts?
