Facebook’s former VP says, “dopamine-driven feedback loops are destroying how society works”

Facebook’s former vice president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya gave a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business blasting his former employer Facebook, and the entire social media space that has created the tools that are currently “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

The entire talk is well worth a watch, and here are the best parts of the interview as summarized by Fast Company…

– That he feels “tremendous guilt” about Facebook. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

– “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created [including the hearts, likes, and thumbs up of various social media channels] are destroying how society works.” He added, “[There’s] no civil discourse, no cooperation; [only] misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem–this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

– Regarding an incident in which seven innocent men in India were lynched after a hoax about kidnappings spread through WhatsApp: “That’s what we’re dealing with. And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.”

– Unsurprisingly, when it comes to social media, his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”