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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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately I know a bunch of people 35+ that can't get their faces out of Facebook. It gets annoying when trying to have a conversation with someone and they come over and shove their phone in your face to look at some pointless thing you don't care about, on Facebook. One of them even makes up excuses about how they can do their job plus keep up with whats happening on Facebook while at work (they can't even walk up or down a short flight of stairs without taking their face out of their phone.. smh). The worst part is when they get visibly angry when I ask what keeps them so enthralled for so long.
I (40) however, could care less about it. I have a Facebook account which I log into maybe once every couple months.
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.
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.
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.
On Facebook:
I don't have to visit a political discussion to see close friends of times past cry about taxes when I know they're in a low tax bracket and possibly on welfare or see some guy who used to ask me to fix his computer for beer like monthly, ranting into the ether about how he doesn't need or want net neutrality.
If I think they might be paid shills it's ok but it's bad when I see people I kinda like with heads full paid for opinions.
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.