‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,’ says Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president
The company has made headlines recently with revelations that it sold ads during the US presidential campaign to a Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda
The Facebook founders purposefully created something addictive, according to Sean Parker, the social network’s first president.
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” Sean Parker said in an interview published by Axios on Thursday.
With each like and comment, Facebook is “exploiting” human psychology on purpose to keep users hooked on a “social-validation feedback loop”, Parker said, adding that it is “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with”.
Parker, the billionaire Napster co-founder who later served as Facebook’s founding president, made the comments at an Axios event at the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia. Speaking to Axios’ Mike Allen, Parker called himself “something of a conscientious objector”.
“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 … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways,” Parker said.
A network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other
When helping Facebook get off the ground in 2004, Parker said, he and others involved in the nascent social network thought: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”