The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Facebook hits back to deny it is ‘ripping apart social fabric’
Former top executive worked for ‘a very different company’
Facebook says it is a different company to the one described by a former executive as ripping apart society.
Former vice-president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya said he feels tremendous guilt over the creation of the site, adding: “We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”.
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.
“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals – hearts, likes, thumbs up.
“And we conflate that with value and we conflate that with truth.
“Instead, what it is is fake brittle popularity.”
However, the social media giant has dismissed Mr Palihapitiya’s description as one of a company that no longer exists.
“Chamath has not been at Facebook for more than six years,” a spokeswoman for the firm said.
“Facebook was a very different company back then and as we have grown we have realised 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.”
It was quite some time ago (circa 700BC to be slightly more precise) that the Greek poet Hesiod called for people to “observe due measure; moderation is best in all things”.
To be fair he probably didn’t have social media in mind, but his thoughts are nevertheless apt.
As a founder of Facebook expresses his deep regret over the site’s impact on the fabric of society, the need to use such modern tools in moderation is worth bearing in mind.