Chamath Palihapitiya cited the lynching of seven people in
Jharkhand that was triggered by a hoax on WhatsApp
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Chamath Palihapitiya speaking at the Stanford business school |
A former Facebook executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt”
for his work on “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society
works”, while citing the lynching of seven people in Jharkhand that was
triggered by a hoax on WhatsApp.
Chamath Palihapitiya, now the CEO of
Social Capital, joined Facebook in 2007 and rose to become its vice president
for user growth before he left the social media giant in 2011. The Sri
Lankan-origin tech entrepreneur said Facebook users would have to decide whether
they want to be “programmed” and how much of their “intellectual independence”
they were willing to give up.
Palihapitiya made the remarks while
speaking at an event at the Stanford business school last month but they were
reported by several websites only on Monday.
He made particular mention of the
lynchings in Jharkhand – caused by a hoax on WhatsApp, which is now owned by
Facebook – to drive home his point that social media is “eroding the core
foundations of how people behave” with each other.
“There was a hoax in WhatsApp where in
some like village in India, people were afraid that their kids were going to
get kidnapped etc and then there were these lynchings that happened as a
result, where people were like vigilante, running around, they think they found
the person, I mean seriously,” he said.
“That’s what we’re dealing with…Imagine
when you take that to the extreme – where bad actors can now manipulate large
swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s a really, really bad state of
affairs and we compound the problem.”
Palihapitiya said he felt “tremendous
guilt” for the tools he helped create for Facebook, though he added that he
believes the company “overwhelmingly does good in the world”.
“It literally is a point now where I
think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how
society works,” he said.
“If you feed the beast, that beast will
destroy you, if you push back on it, we have a chance to control it, rein it
in. It is a point in time where people need to hard break from some of these
tools and some of things you rely on – the short term dopamine-driven feedback
loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”
Referring to allegations of Russian
meddling in the US elections through social media, he added: “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.”
Palihapitiya said people on Facebook
“curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection” to get rewarded
with “hearts, likes thumbs up” and conflated that with value and the truth.
“Instead, what it really is, is fake
brittle popularity that is short term and leaves you even more vacant and
empty,” he said.
Palihapitiya joined a growing list of
critics of Facebook, especially after concerns about how online platforms and
the proliferation of fake news affected the outcome of the US presidential
election and the Brexit vote in the UK.
Last month, Facebook’s founding
president Sean Parker criticised the way the company exploits a “vulnerability
in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop”.
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