Former Facebook VP says social media is ripping society apart

I have a love/hate relationship with social media. On the one hand, it’s a great way for me to engage with people, given that I work from home and my social interactions are largely limited to my cats and my kids. On the other, I feel that it’s allowed people to be awful to each other, without any of the recourse or feedback that would happen in face-to-face conversation. There’s no longer any sort of nuance to conversation – especially heated conversation – and everything seems to have devolved into some sort of us vs them stance.

I’m not the only one who seems to feel that social media can be quite a negative presence. Former vice president for user growth at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, says he feels “tremendous guilt” over the social platform he helped propel.

[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes”]“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works. 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.”[/quotes]

Palihapitiya cites an example where hoax messages on social media led to the lynching of seven innocent people.

[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes”]“That’s what we’re dealing with, and imagine taking 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.”[/quotes]

He suggests people take a “hard break” from social media. He does, however, say that platforms like these are just tools – and it’s up to society how they use them. Unfortunately, most of society seem to be tools as well.