Facebook ex-president Sean Parker: 'God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains' (FB)

sean parker facebook president

Facebook's first president, Sean Parker, has been sharply critical of the social network, accusing it of exploiting human "vulnerability."
"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he said.
His comments are part of a growing wave of disillusionment and concern from tech figures towards the products they helped build.

Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, has a disturbing warning about the social network: "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

Speaking to Axios, the entrepreneur and executive talked openly about what he perceives as the dangers of social media, and how it allegedly exploits human "vulnerability."

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'" said Parker, who joined Facebook in 2004 when it was under a year old.

"And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments. It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."

He added: "The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Some in tech are growing disillusioned — and worried

Parker isn't the only tech figure to become disillusioned and worried by what they helped create. Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, has been outspoken in his criticism of how tech companies' products hijack users' minds.

"If you’re an app, how do you keep people hooked? Turn yourself into a slot machine," he wrote in a widely shared Medium post in 2016.

"We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People's time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

In a recent feature, The Guardian spoke to multiple tech workers and industry figures who have since been critical of Silicon Valley practices.

Loren Brichter, the designer who created the slot machine-like pull-down-to-refresh mechanism now synonymous on smartphones, said: "I've spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I've done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all ... Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I'm not saying I'm mature now, but I'm a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides."

And Roger McNamee, an investor in Facebook and Google, said: "The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences ... The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models."

The comments by Parker and others can also be taken as further evidence of how public sentiment about Silicon Valley is souring. Once lauded in Utopian terms, companies like Facebook have now come under heavy criticism over the spread of "fake news" and how Russian operatives have been able to hijack them for propaganda purposes.

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