It’s become painfully obvious in recent years that the nation, and greater Western world, have a serious problem in the form of social media. What was supposed to be a broadening of communities and a way to bring people together over great distances has turned into chainsaw ripping at the seems of our society.
Social cohesion is in a terrible state in the US, and no matter how ridiculous it sounds, entities like Twitter and Facebook are largely to blame. It’s become so apparent that even high-ranking members of these companies are admitting it, with the latest being a former executive at Zuckerberg’s monster.
As reported at the New York Post, Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and later became its vice president for user growth, said that he and the company’s founders “have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”
The engineer said he now feels “tremendous guilt” for the impact Facebook has had on the world, and that he refuses to allow his children to create profiles on the platform. “They’re not allowed to use this s–t,” he said.
Palihapitiya isn’t the only Facebook alum to recently admit to the cancerous effects the site has had on society. Last month, the company’s first president, Sean Parker, admitted he was “something of a conscientious objector” to the social networking giant.
Parker said Facebook is designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology” to get its users addicted. Facebook “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker told Axios in early November. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Palihapitiya made the comments while speaking to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he admitted to personally having nothing to do with social networks for years, due to the negative impacts he believes they have on their users.
He also said that people coming to communicate via likes, retweets, and shares is a disastrous plague undermining humans’ ability to truly communicate with one another.
He added that he hates how the company manipulates its user’s behavior and makes them “give up … intellectual independence.” He said it has become a platform “where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything [they] want.”
“We are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other,” he said. “And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore.”
Palihaitiya also talked about the early days of Facebook and how even then there were discussions about the kind of impact the platform could have on society given assuming it was successful.
“I think in the back, deep, deep recesses [of our minds], we kind of knew something bad could happen,” Palihapitiya said. “But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he continued. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Palihaitiya is spot on with his criticisms, and while better late than never rings true here, significant and irreversible damage has already been done by the social network. It’s already drastically changed the way we communicate, in the worst way possible. It’s stoked divisions of all kinds and made folks more disagreeable and less open to legitimate discourse.
All one has to do is get on Twitter or check one’s newsfeed to see how vapid and inane it all is. It’s become a constant search for that dopamine high via constant and increasingly extreme virtue signaling. And if something isn’t done about this problem, there’s no telling where we’re going to end up as a society.
Source: New York Post