Former Facebook Vice-President Says Social Media Is Destroying Society

Chamath Palihapitiya, who worked as Facebook's vice president for user growth, was speaking at an event run by the Stanford Graduate School of Business on 10 November in which he described feeling "tremendous guilt" in helping the company attract two billion users.

Palihapitiya said, The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.

This is not about Russian ads, This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other, he added.

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.

We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works," he told the audience.

He advised people take a hard break from social media, describing its effect as short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops.

Facebook has pushed back on the former executive’s comments, saying in a statement Tuesday that Palihapitiya has not worked there for more than six years and that it was a very different company back then.

The company only recently acknowledged that it sold advertisements to Russian operatives seeking to sow division among US voters during the 2016 election. Russia has denied trying to influence the US election.

Facebook has also faced significant criticism for its role in amplifying anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar amid suspected ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.

Details of the hour-long talk began to be shared widely after the Guardian reported on the remarks which had been published by tech website the Verge on Monday.

The Guardian's article has been shared on social media more than 8,000 times. On Tuesday the words 'former Facebook' was trending on Twitter, generating more than 12,000 tweets since Monday.

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