Feeding the Beast

How Facebook is tearing apart the social fabric

CHAMATH Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth and currently founder and CEO of the Social Capital partnership, was asked last month at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event about digital companies exploiting consumer behavior. Here is the question and Palihapitiya’s response, lightly edited for clarity.

You said that this is a time for soul searching in social media businesses, and you were part of building the largest one. What soul searching are you doing right now on that?

PALIHAPITIYA: I feel tremendous guilt. I think 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.” I think in the deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen, but I think the ways we defined it were not like this.

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.

If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in, and this is a point in time where people need a hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on. The short-term dopamine-driven feed- back loops that we have created are destroying how society works: No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russian ads — this is a global problem.

So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave to and between each other, and I don’t have a good solution. My solution is: I just don’t use these tools anymore, I haven’t for years. It’s created huge tension with my friends, huge tensions in my social circles. If you look at my Facebook feed I probably have posted less than 10 times in seven years.

And it’s weird — I guess I kind of just innately didn’t want to get programmed and so I just tuned it out. But I didn’t confront it and now I see what’s happening and it really bums me out.

There are examples where there was a hoax in India. People were afraid that their kids were going to get kidnapped, etc. And then there were these lynchings that happened as a result, where people were running around like vigilantes.

Imagine when you take that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs. And we compound the problem. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in the short term — signals, hearts, likes, thumbs-up — and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth. And instead what it really is, is fake brittle popularity.

That’s short term and that leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it. Because then it forces you into this vicious cycle where you think, “What’s the next thing I need to do now? Because I need it back.”

Think about that compounded by 2 billion people, and then think about how people react to the perceptions of others. It’s just really bad.

I think Facebook overwhelmingly does positive good in the world. Where I have decided to spend my time is to take the capital that they rewarded me with, and now focus on the structural changes that I can control.

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

And everybody has to soulsearch about what they’re willing to do, because you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you have to decide how much of your intellectual independence you’re willing to give up.