Former Facebook executive says he won't let his children use the site
A former Facebook executive said he won’t let his children use the social media platform because it’s “ripping apart” society.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and later became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” for helping develop the site and that he and the company’s founders “have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”, the New York Post reports.
Mr Palihapitiya said his children “are not allowed to use this s***”.
“We are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other,” he said in a speech to the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the US.
“And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore.”
Mr Palihapitiya added that he believes the site makes users give up their “intellectual independence” and that despite believing “something bad could happen” in the early stages of developing it they didn’t see Facebook turning out the way it has.
It follows Facebook’s first president, Sean Baker, last month admitting he was “something of a social media objector” to the network because it “changes your relationship with society, with each other”.
