Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media Is Ripping Society Apart

“If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you.”

There are plenty of voices decrying the pernicious effects of social media on society, but when one of those voices is an architect of Facebook’s rise to near omnipresence, it draws a bit more attention. That was the case when Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, spoke to a group of graduate students at the Stanford University School of Business last month.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” Palihapitiya, currently the CEO of Social Capital and owner of the Golden State Warriors, said. “I think we all knew in the back of our minds — even though we feigned this whole line that there probably aren’t any really bad unintended consequences — I think in the back deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen, but I think the way we defined it was not like this.”

The full interview is above

“It literally is at a point now,” he continued, “where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are.”

Palihapitiya explained how online popularity is a vicious circle, prompting more and more outlandish and extreme behavior to keep the “likes” coming. “The short-term dopamine driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

Read the rest from David Thornton HERE.

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