Inc. Magazine sat down with Chamath Palihapitiya a former VP of user growth at Facebook. Have you ever created something that you thought would help people, only to discover that it would harm them afterward?
In an unexpected turn of events, the former Facebook executive spoke with the Stanford Graduate School of Business about his feelings of guilt and regret of helping found a company that has been fundamentally detrimental to the way people interact today. Palihapitiya first began at the social media company in 2007, three years after its founding by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. At the time, Palihapitiya recounted that few really considered the negative effects of a platform like Facebook.
But as Facebook's popularity grew, it the negative consequences of constant, excessive social networking became clearer. And the problem became much bigger than Facebook as merely an online platform -- it changed the way people interact on a day-to-day basis and restructured an entire existing social structure, something few people could have foreseen after the advent of texting.
"It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are," he said. "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it's not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem."
Over the next 2 episodes, we are going to discuss the impact of social media and reality tv on your company.
We are responsible for our actions. It seems to me that civility is dying in exchange for likes, retweets, and followers. The crazier it is the better.