Former Executive Feels ‘Tremendous Guilt’ over Helping Create Facebook

One of Facebook’s founding executives, Chamath Palihapitiya, recently opened up about the social media platform’s unintended consequences and his role in creating social media as we all know it.

In November, another Facebook executive, Sean Parker, admitted that the social media network has led to some “unintended consequences” like altering the relationship with society and people’s relationships with one another.

Palihapitiya who led the network’s division for user growth from 2005 to 2011 said in a recent speech aimed at a crowd of Stanford students that Facebook is “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Palihapitiya underlined that people get so easily hooked because Facebook offers a dopamine-driven feedback loop whenever someone likes their posts or comments favorably. The former executive made the remarks just days after Parker’s as if the two former Facebook bosses had prepared their speeches jointly.

Facebook Exec Feels ‘Tremendous Guilt’

• Palihapitiya voiced disappointment with Facebook because it has killed civil discourse and cooperation among people.
• Instead, the platform can be used for a lot of mistruth and misinformation.
• He underlined that Facebook is no longer an “American problem”. It has become a global issue.

When the Stanford host asked him what his feelings about helping create the social media behemoth were, Palihapitiya replied, “I feel tremendous guilt.” He added that all who helped create Facebook must have known in “the back of [their] minds” that the network will have some “unintended consequences”.

I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen,

Palihapitiya said.

However, Facebook creators didn’t create Facebook to “erode the core foundation” of interpersonal relationships and how people communicate and behave with one another. Palihapitiya admitted that he has no other solution, but ditching the platform altogether, and barring his kids’ access to it.

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