Facebook Executives: Social Media is programming your mind and destroying society.

[DetlefK]

Read it.

Think about it.



https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-exec-you-don-t-realize-it-but-you-are-1821181133

Last month, Facebook’s first president Sean Parker opened up about his regrets over helping create social media as we know it today. “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because of the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker said. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth, also recently expressed his concerns. During a recent public discussion at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Palihapitiya—who worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2011—told the audience, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Some of his comments seem to echo Parker’s concern. Parker has said that social media creates “a social-validation feedback loop” by giving people “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”

Just days after Parker made those comments, Palihapitiya told the Stanford audience, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya said. “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.”

...

Speaking more broadly on the subject of social media, Palihapitiya said he doesn’t use social media because he “innately didn’t want to get programed.” As for his kids: “They’re not allowed to use this shit.”

...

“And don’t think, ‘Oh yeah, not me, I’m fucking genius, I’m at Stanford.’ You’re probably the most likely to fucking fall for it. ‘Cause you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.”




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These guys are finally putting a name to something I have been noticing for a while now:

- Drive-by posts. Airing some grievance that is totally unrelated to the topic, just because you want to vent. (I have seen them creeping into DU of lately.)

- Echo-chambers. This is especially true for the Alt-Right and Alt-Left. No matter what the topic, the Alt-Right ALWAYS finds a way to start talking about how this is the fault of the Jews. No matter what the topic, the Alt-Left ALWAYS finds a way to start talking about how this is the fault of the US. And then they go back and forth in their meaningless, mutually-reassuring, evidence-free group-think.
"They are evil. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Their fault. Their fault. So evil."

- Trolling. Posting provocative stuff to provoke somebody into freaking out and starting an argument. (I have seen this in another online-forum where some edge-lord posted anti-semitic cartoons and tried to provoke me into name-calling him. When I called a forum-admin instead, he was suddenly super-nice and apologetic.)

[Egnever]

1. As someone who has avoided Facebook like the plague.

I somewhat agree with this assessment.

It increasingly produces echo chambers as you fine tune your feed with likes and dislikes.

My own reason for avoiding it is because it is easy to weaponize. How many times have we seen people taken down for a post on Facebook or twitter. One badly worded post can leave your life in tatters if the internet picks it up and runs with it.

I started on the internet in it's infancy and I went to great lengths to avoid being identified because I did not know where it was heading. This lasted for years. You could not google my name which is somewhat unique and find anything on me right up to the day I joined facebook. It was a mistake, almost instantly after that the pieces seemed to come together and you could now find me through a google search where that was not possible before and along with facebook a lot of other public information seemed to come together at once.

There are plenty of good reasons to want that exposure and for people that works for or are trying to get that I think facebook can be a great tool. That said if I were a criminal I think Facebook would provide me a wealth of information to target potential victims. simply by going through peoples feeds I could discover all sorts of things about their habits and find prefect opportunities to use that information to perpetrate whatever deed I was attempting.

People are finally getting smarter and not friending everyone and also restricting their postings to certain people but there is a long way to go on that front.

Echo chambers can be dangerous to be sure and I don't disagree with the conclusions in your post even though my reasons for avoiding it are different.

[malaise]

4. I never joined

and still have no interest - same with Twitter.

[kimbutgar]

2. Every time I see a parent giving their young child their cell phone I want to scream

Facebook has some good attributes. Finding long lost friends but it can be addictive. I agree with some of their assessment it can be damaging to relationships. My husband refuses to go on it but loves looking at pictures of his families kids when they post them.

[angstlessk]

3. I do not do social media.

I do have a facebook page which I delete any person linking...the same with linkedin and twitter demands my phone number, which it will get when I am in hell (BTW I'm an atheist, so hell ain't likely)