This video of former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya is worth checking out. It's only the latest example of major tech insiders turning against their creations:
Fast Company transcribed some of Palihapitiya's remarks, in which he said:
"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."
Palihapitiya is hardly the first former social media architect to express this kind of sentiment, notes The Verge:
Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.
These former employees have all spoken out at a time when worry about Facebook’s power is reaching fever pitch.
For a previous version of this kind of alarm-raising, check out this worrisome Guardian article from October.
In the article, former social media architects talk about how they regret what they've done and now keep themselves—and their children—away from iPhones, iPads, and social media platforms that exploit natural human insecurities in order to addict people to "likes" and whatnot. According to the article, that addiction then allows giant tech companies to better harvest human data for sale in the booming "attention economy."