Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media is Ripping Apart Society (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels "tremendous guilt" about the company he helped make. "I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works," he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a âoehard breakâ from social media. Palihapitiya's criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works," he said, referring to online interactions driven by "hearts, likes, thumbs-up." "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." Also read: Sean Parker Unloads on Facebook 'Exploiting' Human Psychology

Comments

He's right.

[DogDude]

He's exactly right.

Re:He's right.

[DogDude]

But to be fair, most of humanity simply isn't ready for the Internet. The Internet is still the Wild West, full of garbage, and most people are simply not smart or savvy enough to deal with it. Giving regular people exposure to the raw Internet was going to lead them to use it for porn and TV and tabloid quality information, regardless of what "services" exist. It's true that FaceTweetGram took advantage of the uneducated masses, but somebody else would've if they didn't.

Re:He's right.

[DontBeAMoran]

And since smart people avoid things like Facebook, it only amplifies the noise-to-signal ratio and makes it seem even worst than it is.

Re:He's right.

[JonnyCalcutta]

There are founding principles? Of what? The world? Mankind? Facebook? Your house? Or (despite the summary saying this isn't a uniquely USian issue) are you just being pathetically parochial?

I hate to say it because it just sounds like a bitch - but the view that 'other peoples opinions are the problem' IS THE PROBLEM!

Re:He's right.

[LeftCoastThinker]

And where the real world has self correcting mechanisms for assholes (when someone gets in your face screaming obscenities, you tend to knock their teeth out, most people only need that experience once to modify their behavior), there is no equivalent online where antisocial, uncivil behavior can be properly discouraged.

To be clear, we are not talking about unpopular ideas or positions you don't agree with, rather just basic, civil discourse and an understanding that the other humans you interact with online are more like you than not (with bad days, goals, triumphs and failures, dreams and fears, etc.) And should be treated with the golden rule.

Social media is only amplification

[SuperKendall]

I think the notion that social media is tearing apart the country ignores that, like soylent green, social media is people.

The problem is not really social media. It's that more and more people are growing to be far more intolerant of diverse ideas. Social media just gives us a window into the wider picture how much of a problem that has become...

We all know people that have grown far less tolerant and far more angry, I'm talking both left and right. That is a fundamental problem and I don't think it changes much if you rein in social media.

Re:Social media is only amplification

[Anonymous Coward]

social media is people who are being emotionally manipulated by machine learning algorithms to get them to click on more ads, with absolutely no moral oversight in play

there are no people making decisions, this is deliberately to avoid the question of "is it moral to do this?"

Re:Social media is only amplification

[ilguido]

That is a fundamental problem and I don't think it changes much if you rein in social media.

In my opinion there is a problem with social media. In real life, it is difficult to find a place (workplace, schoolroom, bus stop) where everybody thinks the same: you have to compare your ideas. In social media you can easily choose to talk only to similarly minded people and so you lose the ability to confront different ideas. All these snowflakes are children born from the marriage between political correctness and social media.

Re:Social media is only amplification

[Captain Splendid]

Mod parent up. Back in the day, if you were particularly bigoted, you tended to keep your mouth shut because even in your little bubble, there were very few like you. And no matter what the average slashdotter likes to believe, most people prefer not to be alone even if it means they can't share their theories on why women are so inferior.

Then along comes the internet. All of a sudden, not only are you not alone, but time and effort has gone into creating safe online spaces for you. Not only can you gab to your hearts content about The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, there's thousands of you to do it with!

So we've spent the last two decades knitting together every single little niche group into their own global enclaves, which is great when it brings together fans of an obscure anime, less so when hordes of fascist assholes start using their newfound power.

Re:Social media is only amplification

[DarkOx]

I don't know that its the echo chamber so much as the narrowness of focus. When we interact online we don't know much if anything about the rest of the 'person' only that they agree or disagree with us.

That is different than in 'real life' where usually we see more of each others lives. You see you coworker also drives a .... you see photos of his or her children on their desks doing similar activities you do with your own, you take part in conversations on other subjects where you do agree.

Basically you learn to 'respect' them. When you arrive at a topic you can't agree on, you loose the assumption of hostility. You already have accepted the premise hey this a reasonably individual, who makes the same judgements and reaches the same conclusions I do much of the time. We just differ here.

Online is more like, he disagrees with me, it must be malice or abject stupidity because what else could explain it? Without that personal context its hard for a lot of people to imagine any other possibilities.

Re:Social media is only amplification

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the younger generation is just as intolerant as the old, they just are bigots/intolerant about other things. In the 60s, your parents were intolerant of gays, coloreds, and communists. Now their grandkids are intolerant of Christians, stay-at-home moms, and capitalism. Try going to Berkeley and carrying a Trump poster or simply reading out loud the Bible and learn all about their "tolerance". Just because YOU agree with their bigotry doesn't mean it's not bigotry...

Re:Social media is only amplification

[omnichad]

I take it you've never seen a meeting of church leadership before.

Re:Social media is only amplification

[Jason Levine]

I'll speak from my experience. My father is pretty bigoted. As might be expected, I started down that path. One day in class I was making fun of Jehovah's Witnesses when a kid behind me said that he was a Jehovah's Witness. All of a sudden, they weren't some faceless group that I could make fun of for laughs, but an actual person. I realized what I was doing was wrong and that I had to stop.

Now imagine a similar situation but, instead of a mixed group of kids in a classroom, I was posting in a forum filled with like-minded people. My rant against a different group of people is met with laughter and virtual high-fives instead of "hey, that's out of line" comments. Instead of changing my behavior and reducing my bigotry, I'd just reinforce my bigotry. If I got too bigoted for that group to tolerate, I'd move on to a different group where they were even more bigoted. The reinforcement loop wouldn't function to reduce bigotry and expose me to different viewpoints, but to increase bigotry and isolate me from those different than myself.

Or Lack of Critical Thinking Skills?

[OnTheEdge]

Wouldn't the ability to process incoming information in a thoughtful, rational way trump the effects of social media's dark side?

Thats capitalism

[fluffernutter]

Social media does nothing but accentuate the worst of humanity. Like restaurants can make more money if they make crappy food that's bad for us and we eat it up, so does social media sensationalize *everything* to get more clicks.

Hard not to blame capitalism. Until their are checks in balances in place to move in a way that is actually good for us, it's all a race into the toilet.

It certainly makes people more excitable

[ErichTheRed]

The thing about social media isn't so much the power it gives anyone to say anything...it's the fact that everyone is exposed to it 24 hours a day. At the same time, the algorithms used by these services put people further and further into ideological bubbles where they only hear the opinions they want to hear.

For example, consider the Trump investigations. Whatever you think of them, I guarantee you that even if they find unequivocal, smoking-gun level, zero-bias evidence against him, his millions of fans will immediately brush it off as "fake news" because they've been convinced that only their opinions are correct...and we'll have a serious problem on our hands if any moves are made to force him out. That's why he's not worried...all he has to do is tell his fans that he's under attack and they will take to the streets.

The other danger is depression...almost no one posts negative or mundane aspects of their lives unless they're looking for sympathy. If you're prone to depression, looking around and seeing everyone else having a grand time has to take a toll.

Alternative hypotheses

[naubol]

Can we reject the hypothesis that social media is merely revealing our differences and forcing us to deal with the results of a long process of slowly building stratification? I'd be interested to see if the sense of stratification grows over the long haul.

In my youth, my southern Baptist grandfather didn't get a daily reminder of how awful I think his policies are, viz a viz homosexuality, and he didn't get a daily reminder that I am going to burn in hell. He went about his life hoping I was still going to church and thinking society was mostly like him, white and Christian. I got to forget the depressing xenophobia of rural regions in my urban, liberal enclave. Then Facebook came along and made it clear to both of us that there were many, many Americas full of people doing things I wish they weren't doing.

My attitude is: let's give this some time. It's kinda bruising to keep being a butthole on the internet, maybe we'll work it out well enough that the culture wars become a little less ridiculous. I hear anecdotes that more and more teenagers are confidently (and often casually) uninterested in their parents' culture wars but instead adopting a political position more likely to tolerate diverse groups and less likely to tolerate political positions that disenfranchise others. While this may be quite dogmatic from a certain perspective, it could mean a future where people aren't particularly interested in fighting culture wars instead of fighting over political policies.

I'd also question the idea that we're always susceptible to outrage. Does outrage media sell as well in multicultural societies that largely tolerate intra-group differences? Does it sell as well with gen Z? As an oft-maligned millennial, my experience is that the boomers feel outrage when politics aren't serving them, gen my generation is more likely to feel outraged when anyone is being excluded, and gen Z'ers can't wait for both of us to die off.

I'm sure people blamed the newspaper for encouraging people not to like the monarchy.

All The Wrong Reasons

[NicknameUnavailable]

Facebook and similar companies are evil due to their spying on users, selling user data to governments and marketing agencies, their tactics of creating shadow profiles to track and monitor even people not on their networks, and censorship of topics based on what they themselves feel is right or wrong. The dopamine high people get posting is irrelevant because only the lowest of "people" can succumb to it, honestly it probably quells violence more than anything by satisfying their poor impulses temporarily and in an unfulfilling manner leading to depression. Granted, society has been driven by people controlling masses of people with poor impulse control for eons, but that doesn't mean destroying that aspect of society is remotely a bad thing. The other issues are vastly more damaging and honestly all these "ex" Facebook executives "speaking out" against the "dopamine high" they engineer around strikes me as a low energy distraction campaign from the real issues they cause.