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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
He's exactly right.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mod me up if you think he's right!
#DeleteFacebook
Wouldn't the ability to process incoming information in a thoughtful, rational way trump the effects of social media's dark side?
Oh, wait. Now what?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Those of us over about 35 really don't give a stuff, we have real lives to lead and social media or discussion boards such as this are merely an entertaining diversion to while away the working day. For millenials it is their life, since most of them don't see to have a real one, at least not from a social point of view. A rather pitiable generation really.
I love your analogy, Trump = villain (google|facebook) = heroes.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Did someone already call Caption Obvious? In other new: our future society can not live by selling ads to each other, , Just saying.
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.
Forums did this 20+ years ago.
Echo chamber? Sure!
Amplifier? Of course.
One guy says "This is the TRUTH" and half a million mindless parrots nod their heads and go "a-yup" and then spread that "truth" up and down the net.
Seriously, we're social animals but obviously there's only so much social socializing that can go on at a given time.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
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.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
This is precisely the reason why I quit Facebook permanently. The platform represents all that I dislike in society. Quitting Facebook was one of the best decisions that I ever made. Nothing good comes from it. It encourages us to compare ourselves negatively to others whom may have more money or more success. Facebook is psychologically damaging.
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.
One only needs to take a peek at Reddit to see just exactly what he's talking about. Makes Facebook look tame especially in the news on political subs.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Next they will be telling us TV is bad for society .....
Yes the average slashdotter and early internet adopter is miles ahead of today's internet user.
If it is such a problem stop using it! Never had a Facebookings account. Slashdot on the otherhand....
This is not how peering works but ok.
Facebook was so invested in because its potential to break down society was realized by its big investors. It wasn't a shot in the dark with their billions of dollars. It wasn't a surprise that social media would transform our society. They knew what it was to become and it profits them immensely.
Why do they want to break down society? Because they want to increase the level of control they have. Instead of programming society on the scale of groups, they want to control every atom; every individual, and open up new roads to exponentially more power.
People always explain away things like this saying "well that's just what people want and the company is just giving them what they want and making money, so this isn't really bad, this is progress! There's no conspiracy! People are smart, they aren't so easily suckered into things! They know what's good!"
The thing is that people are actually not that picky. They will accept just about ANY given solution for their basic needs as long as authority backs it consistently enough. So it becomes a question of what exactly we are progressing towards and who's interest it really is in.
Humans are not some transcendent creature with the guarantee of self awareness and intellect and rationality because of how much inherently better they are than all other life on Earth. These are optional features supported by a certain way of life. If you take away the nuances from the human way of life, if you take away the culture that support these higher functions, people go into "backward compatibility mode"; they re-adapt to a simpler, savage, prehistoric world. Simply put they devolve.
While most people don't know themselves well enough to see this, there are people who know this about humanity, and they know about it deeply. These people are leaders.
Leaders either choose to try to raise people up to their own level of awareness or leaders choose to plunge people down so they can never rise up. Leaders choose either cooperation or enslavement.
Humans are tribal creatures. They are beyond racist. They are beyond nepotistic. They will kill members of their own families who displease them. Humans are not only genocidal by default, they a fratricidal by default.
We can see this at every point in our history. We can see this in our close relatives like the chimpanzee that continue to live a way of life that we departed from eons ago.
Leaders cooperate and enslave in degrees. The closer you are to directly supporting the substance of the leader, that is, the more you share in common with the leader that you align with that leader's will, the more cooperation you will receive. The further, the more enslavement you will receive, up to the point that when your interests drift sufficiently you are immediately killed or otherwise neutralized.
What this amounts to is simple: as time goes on you will only become more distant and unable to adapt to the leader. The leader's own will replace everyone else. Eventually you drift into the zone of no return in relation to a current leader and unless the leader changes, your line will end: you, your family, your children all die and there are no more children thereafter.
Usually this takes a long time, so long that the diverse interests in the world shift and leaders change and most tribes survive at least long enough to make a compromise and intermingle with the dominant tribe. But things are becoming unusual: power is being consolidated on unprecedented scales with unprecedented stability, and it is making ever more exacting demands on its subjects as their numbers swell to challenge the Earth's ability to sustain them.
Humanity's genocidal nature has risen to the surface.
This all sounds very grim, until you consider the fact we've been up and down this situation for millions of years and have some pretty good solutions to the pitfalls and the problems that lead to them.
All the machinery is in place for us to CHOOSE our own leaders. Are you choosing yours? Are you prepare
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
The concept that everyone has a vote, and that every vote is equal falls apart when a) those voters are misinformed and when b) those votes are manipulated psychologically.
Of course, being misinformed and psychologically manipulated is the very definition of competitive marketing.
As such, combining marketing tactics with political campaigning tactics basically destroys democracy.
Sure, the voters voted for it. And I guess by that definition it's democracy, but no more than a child who votes the way his father tells him to vote, or an employee the way his boss tells him to vote, or an american the way his russian facebook friends convinces him to vote.
It's simply too easy to convince large swaths of voters of important misinformation.
This is when democracy fails.
The major revolutions of the 19th century happened because people had to physically gather in order to air their grievances, discuss their ideas, and design their plots. Once they had a crowd gathered together, it was literally a step away from marching out into the streets and taking to the barricades. The internet doesn't have that physical organizational power. Keyboard warriors fuming away at their desks are relatively harmless. Sure, you might get few lone kooks who shoot up a church. But the instant gratification of social media cannot sustain large scale organized action.
Perhaps you haven't heard, but Slashdot doesn't render some characters well.
... recommending people take a âoehard breakâ from social media...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
it intensifies your personality.
But...what if you're an a------e?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The click-inducing bots show people what they want to see. While I believe the majority of people are mature enough to see through it, enough get all out wound up via confirmation bias and conspiracy theories that they become extremists. Thus, we have more extremists, and they in turn create noise and confusion such that few know what's really going on because it takes time and effort to sort out messes and verify stuff.
I wonder how this will play out in places like China that try to micromanage social media. Many there realize they are being manipulated by the gov't and take stuff with a grain of salt. If the gov't ever needs to cash in on their credibility during tension, they'll find they have none. China's economy has been growing such that people are less likely to complain now, but bleep happens and someday their credibility will be challenged. What works when bellies are full will not work when they are empty.
Chinese commentators/defenders sometimes use the election of T as an example of the downsides of democracy and free speech. However, lack of democracy can and has resulted in iron-fisted dictators, so neither approach has proven perfect. Plus, we'll have an opportunity to dump T in 3 years, and at most he'll serve only 8 years. Getting rid of bad dictators is harder. Also, checks and balances have largely muted T's agenda.
And one can argue he was elected because the other politicians ignored the plight of the rust-belt: acting as if they were the sacrificial lambs of "free trade" so others could have cheap Walmart trinkets. (T's fixes are not really fixes, but at least he gave the problem attention.) T may be a general jerk, but he was right about one thing: he gave a voice to people ignored before.
Table-ized A.I.
Smart people still live normal lives and use it as a tool (or don't use it). Stupid people let it control there lives, but there will always be something for stupid people to ruin their lives, so it doesn't matter if it's Facebook or something else.
Time to watch this again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The real issue is not the social media, but the fact that ppl, like business executives, have ZERO responsibility. As such, they can be as destructive as they want. /..
Look at
We have trolls here that hide as AC. Cool. There is a need for ACs, but not like we have it.
Instead, we could easily solve this issue by simply allowing ppl to block ACs that are at say 1 or 0 and below. The moderators would not be allowed to do this. In addition, we should have the ability to have VETTED digital keys to verify a user and then start them off at say level 2. And yes, if they get good karma, they go up to 3. Why? Because they have reason to not want to lose that status. OTOH, ACs, many General users do not mind switching out constantly.
But, the issue comes down to responsibility. And Executives, illegal aliens, and ACs have ZERO responsibility which allows for bad behavior.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Absolutely that's a problem, until you start creating regulations that prevent or reduce one's ability to take advantage of another.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That's a completely different problem. That needs to be fixed too but not really on topic in this thread.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"everyone is exposed to it 24 hours a day."
No. That's not the case. People CHOOSE to be exposed to it, and they choose to buy into it.
I used to be on Instagram, until a little over a year ago. I enjoyed it, there were some fun things about it. Then one day I realized I was like a chicken, peck peck pecking my phone all the time. And I quit, and was much happier for it. I don't use FB either.
You can avoid these things, you don't have to pay attention to them. And if you do, you don't HAVE to like/subscribe/whatever. Just stop being a ME TOO person and stop worrying about what everyone else does or thinks.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
...allowed the proliferation of attention whores to quicken. SO glad I'm not on it.
Like restaurants can make more money if they make crappy food that's bad for us and we eat it up
Wait, what? No, no no. You have it all wrong. Capitalism is not the problem, even in the analogy you provided. Did you miss the part where you can go to another restaurant if you don't like the one that serves crappy food? Capitalism is voluntary. Restaurant can choose to serve crappy food and you can choose to eat there - or take your business elsewhere.
As an individual, how will my deciding to go to a better restaurant instead of McDonald's in any way limit McDonald's ability to do business or motivate them to have better food? Companies have long outgrown the ill effects of consumer choice unless many millions decide to do it, and that isn't going to happen. It has been long proven that many individuals cannot collectively make a decision that is the right one for the whole society.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Large companies always get a "former" executive to do an apology when they feel threatened or are about to do something even worse in their next step of entrepreneurship. It's closure for the subconscious and masses because that's how we all think now. Imagine all the people reading this article (or not reading) and going "you tell them," or "finally 'a' voice." Ergo, use one man as a representative just long enough to keep the masses at bay.
Oh good grief.
Facebook is the liquid metal 800-lb unsamarium-alloy gorilla in the social media space, whose very existence dictates the strategy of every other player whose business interests even vaguely impinge upon this niche.
In related news, humans are but one apex predator on planet earth (although this gasp-worthy aphorism elicited less of an eye roll after the mass synthesis of self-assembling unsamarium).
[*] Unsamarium is the name given to the element with atomic number 162—from an island of nucleic stability obtainable only with unsuspected technology of the distant future.
The remarkable thing about people is how flexible our behavior is. That's the product of our massive human brain. Indistinguishable pints of bean soup generate both Shaker barn raisings and witch hunts; soup kitchens and genocide; puritanism and porn addiction, Shakespeare and pop music.
The potential for all that is there so it's meaningless to hold up just one possible result of many as "human nature". Human nature is contradictory.
One possible of social media might be a kind of mass symposium in which user minds are expanded; views of the world made more cosmopolitan; assumptions challenged. It's possible for humans to build communities like that. The problem is that it's not profitable. Time you spend on a site reflecting on what you find there is not time spent in behaviors that can be measured and aggregated into an "engagement metric" justifying a higher advertising fee.
So despite what it could be, what social media actually is is a kind of operant conditioning machine that trains you to be a conformist asshole. It rewards you for expressing conventional ideas in provocative ways because that's what produces large volumes of valuable responses.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The joke is too subtle and recursive to deserve mod points.
Anyway, this problem doesn't apply on Slashdot. The moderation system is too broken. Or perhaps the other problems are just too overwhelming? There's also the factor that the "community" started out on the broken side, so to speak...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Where is this "capitalism" thing you're talking about? Related to that dead "communism" thingamabob?
Seriously, what we have now is corporate cancerism. There is no gawd but profit, and #PresidentTweety is NO prophet. According to Forbes, Apple is the #1 prophet of Gawd Profit.
Facebook is just one of the symptoms. Another is rampant bribery of the cheapest politicians to rig the rules in favor of bigger profits, with tax policies to make the rich richer while reducing our freedoms. Another symptom is disaster porn overwhelming real news. I even regard the division-and-conquest of the public school system as yet another symptom. Perhaps even the most dangerous one.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Meanwhile, the gradient of escape couldn't be limned in brighter lights.
An actual self-perpetuating feedback loop would be the small pockets of intelligent life who have sequestered themselves from social media deliberately dimming the lights and darking the drapes so as to escape notice by the ravening, mutually-loathing hoard.
Turns out, intelligent company is something one must earn by deserving to belong. And even worse, it doesn't pay for itself by being a conspicuous Mensa membership you can crow about and lord over the epsilons and deltas.
But maybe with luck, your biographer will discover your long, secret membership in the eminent Dark WELL.
????? Are you dense or something? You motivate them by not doing business with them. If they care and want your business, then they will cater to your needs and you can both voluntarily do business. If they don't care or want your business then that is their right too. They are not obligated to bow to your demands and you are not obligated to pay them money or eat their swill.
it's pretty simple really unless you have the attitude that you are "owed" something
Let's circle back around to the original conversation. We were talking about making things right for society. People are touting how automated driving will save 20,000 a year, well how many people would it save (and how much easier on health care) if McDonalds had the right motivation to make healthier food. I can stop going (not that I go much anyawy), I can tell everyone I know, it won't change anything. The company is too big and has too far of a reach to respond to individual customers.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
technology has always been creating shifts in definition of humanity
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.