Facebook’s founding executives talk about the negative impact of social media on our lives

You might feel shocked to hear that even Facebook’s founding executives are concerned about the questioning impact of social media on our daily lives. Some Facebook executives like the first president and former vice president talk about their regrets of helping in creating social media which we are used to nowadays.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

It was the previous month when Facebook’s first president Sean Parker said that he regrets of being a part of the creator of this social media which we know today. Parker said, “I don’t know if I understood the consequences of what I was saying, because of the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people, and it changes your relationship with society, with each other.” He added, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Parker has also added “a social-validation feedback loop” by giving people “a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”

Facebook’s former Vice president of user growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, who worked for more than six years on Facebook expressed his grave concerns about the social media and its impact on society. He said, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Palihapitiya stated in a public discussion at the Stanford Graduate School of Business comment which resembles Parker’s explanation of the feedback loop. He said, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.” He added “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.”

When the host of the event asked Chamath Palihapitiya that what if he was doing any soul-searching in regards to his role in creating Facebook. He said “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we invented this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”