Social media is ripping apart the social fabric of the society: Ex-Facebook employee

You may have heard pretty often that one should not be addicted to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Despite the world relying on these platforms to communicate with people around the globe, these platforms still affect the human psychology by a huge margin. It seems that people who make these tools also think the same. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007, also expressed similar concerns.

“It literally is at a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford University. “We are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion, it is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other. I feel tremendous guilt,” Palihapitiya said. “I think we all knew in the back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole line of ‘there probably aren’t any really bad unintended consequences’, I think in the deep deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen,” he added.

However, there are ways to get rid of this issue. As Palihapitiya explains, “People need to hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on, the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we created are destroying how society works, no civil discourse, no-co operation, [but] misinformation and mistruth.”

Facebook is going through a period when the world is using this simple ‘friendly-neighbourhood’ platform as a tool to spread violence and hatred across the young generations, who can be easily influenced. The company has been trying several ways to filter out such negative content so as to keep the platform clean.