Facebook ‘ripping society apart’ (says former top boss of social media giant)

‘Huge tension with my friends’

‘Really bad state of affairs’

FACEBOOK is ripping apart the fabric of society, according to a former top boss.

The technology chief said the social media site was ‘eroding human interactions’ as well as leaving its users feeling ‘vacant and empty’.

‘It is at a point now where we have created tools which are ripping apart the fabric of how society works – that is truly where we are,’ said 41-year-old Chamath Palihapitiya.

‘The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse.

‘No co-operation, misinformation, mistruth.

‘This is not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.’

Mr Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and made a fortune when it floated in 2012, admitted he and his colleagues feared creating social problems.

He said: ‘We all knew in the back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole line of “There probably aren’t any really bad unintended consequences”, that something bad could happen.’

Facebook has come under intensive criticism for giving a platform to paedophiles, terrorists and disseminating ‘fake news’.

But in a speech to students at Stanford Business School in the United States, Mr Palihapitiya revealed his great fear was of his family being ‘programmed’ by social media.

‘I just don’t use these tools any more,’ he said. ‘I haven’t for years. It has created huge tension with my friends and tensions in my social circles but I guess I innately didn’t want to get programmed.

‘I can control my decision, which is I don’t use this s***. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is they’re not allowed to use this s***.’

He urged his elite audience to consider whether they really wanted to use Facebook themselves.

‘You don’t realise it but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you’ve got to decide how much you are willing to give up – how much of your intellectual independence are you willing to give up,’ he said. ‘If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, you have a chance to control it and rein it in.’

Mr Palihapitiya warned of the dangerous consequences of group-think.

He described an incident earlier this year, where six men were beaten to death in India after rumours spread on Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging platform that they were operating a child kidnapping ring.

‘Seriously? That’s what we’re dealing with? Imagine where you take that to the extreme,’ he said. ‘Bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s a really, really bad state of affairs and we compound the problem.

‘We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perception because we get rewarded in these short-term signals – hearts, likes, thumbs up, and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth.

‘Instead what it really is is fake brittle popularity that’s short term and leaves you even more – and admit it – vacant and empty than before you did it.’

Mr Palihapitiya is not the first former Facebook chief to suggest the social network site is having a malign effect.

Sean Parker, its founding president, admitted last month that social media exploits a ‘vulnerability in human psychology’ by encouraging users to become addicted, adding: ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.’

Facebook has stepped up its efforts to combat the problem of violent online extremists, using robots to root them out.

However, it is simultaneously battling myriad other issues.

Earlier this year it was exposed for offering a haven to paedophiles, who use private Facebook groups to share highly sexualised images of young, pre-pubescent girls.

Experts warned that the images – while technically legal – would act like a gateway drug encouraging wouldbe offenders to go on and abuse children in real life.

Studies have warned of links between Facebook and anxiety and depression, as members constantly measure their lives against the edited highlights of other people’s.

Mr Palihapitiya was Facebook’s vice president of ‘user growth, mobile and international’ for four years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He now runs an investment fund.

Facebook declined to comment.