Facebook users ‘ripping apart society – and it’s my fault’

ONE of Facebook’s earliest executives has said the social network is “ripping apart” society and that he feels “tremendous guilt” about his work with the company.

Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007, accused it of “programming” its users and said he no longer uses the website or allows his children to access it.

“It literally is at a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford University, California. “We are in a really bad state of affairs right now in my opinion, it is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”

Mr Palihapitiya, who was the head of growth at Facebook before leaving in 2011, is the latest in a string of early Facebook employees and investors to speak out about the evils of social media and warn the public about its effects on society.

Sean Parker, its former president, has said Facebook is “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”, while Roger Mcnamee, an early investor, accused it and other social media sites of using the techniques of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” Mr Palihapitiya said. “I think in the deep, deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen.

“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals, hearts and likes and thumbsup. We conflate that with value and we conflate that with truth, and instead what it really is is fake brittle popularity that’s short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty.”