A former Facebook executive is speaking out against the social media giant, pointing to the interpersonal and cultural harms he believes the platform is perpetuating.
Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice-president for user growth, said at a recent event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that he feels “tremendous guilt” for having been a part of it all, arguing that Facebook is “ripping apart” social fabrics.
“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said. “That is truly where we are.”
And Palihapitiya didn’t solely target Facebook, as he said social media at large is leading to some broader cultural problems, including informational mishaps, a lack of civil discourse and plenty of other diabolical problems.
In the end, he believes people need a “hard break” from social media and added that he no longer uses Facebook.
“It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave,” Palihapitiya said, adding that it is also “destroying how society works.”
“No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth,” he continued. “And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Watch Palihapitiya’s remarks below:
As The Verge noted, Palihapitiya is hardly the first former Facebook exec to speak out against social media, with investor Sean Parker recently telling Axios that he now believes social media could be addictive and that it might be hurting our brains.
“I don’t know if I really 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,” he said. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”