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posted by janrinok on Monday December 11 2017, @08:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-saw-it-coming dept.

Chamath Palihapitiya, a former vice president for user growth at Facebook, feels (some) guilt about his role in expanding the social media giant:

Palihapitiya's criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works," he said, referring to online interactions driven by "hearts, likes, thumbs-up." "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."

He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people. "That's what we're dealing with," said Palihapitiya. "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." He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children "aren't allowed to use that shit." He later adds, though, that he believes the company "overwhelmingly does good in the world."

[...] In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley's entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into "shitty, useless, idiotic companies," rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.

From a partial transcript:

You don't realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you're willing to give up. How much of your intellectual independence, and don't think, yeah, not me, I'm a genius, I'm at Stanford. You're probably the most likely to fall for it. Because you are check-boxing your whole damn life. No offense, guys.

Previously: Facebook Founding President Sounds Alarm, Criticizes Facebook


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday December 11 2017, @11:44PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 11 2017, @11:44PM (#608540)

    Not disagreeing with any of it but an interesting alternative tack to

    intellectuals are more susceptible to manipulation than the average bear because

    the need for approval

    In like the 60s if a newly minted physics phd wasn't perfect in all ways, that's OK if there's 10 jobs for each grad, so they can be themselves, but now that the ratio is flipped and there's ten times as many grads for each job even in STEM and in the liberal arts its ten times worse, there's going to be pressure to be the signal-iest holier than thou-ist perfectly correct conformist little social media poster the world has ever seen, because, you know, there's only one job and 50 grads applying for it and the other 49 who don't get it will never pay off their loans as bartenders and baristas, no house no car no family their whole lives flashing before their lives now click "like" or move under the highway overpass with the rest of the liberal arts grads, etc.

    Its an evolution in action... give the bottom 90% the economic death penalty over and over and you'll eventually breed up some weirdness along with whatever you thought you were selecting for...

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