‘Social media is ripping our society apart’

“I think we all knew in the back of our minds, even though we feigned this whole line of ‘like, there probably aren’t any really bad unintended consequences’. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen.

Mr Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist whose family emigrated from Sri Lanka to Canada when he was six years old, was speaking at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event.

“It literally is a point now where we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said. “That is truly where we are.”

He is urging people to take a “hard break” from social media and said the “short-term” dopamine hits which gives people are “destroying society”.

“It is a point in time where people need to [take a] hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.

“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. We are in a really bad state of affairs right now.”

Mr Palihapitiya said his only solution is to not use social media and said he has posted on Facebook less than 10 times in the last seven years.

The venture capitalist said he instinctively does not want “to get programmed”. He added that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave”.

Mr Palihapitiya referred to an incident in an Indian village where a rumour online turned into vigilante behaviour in real life.

“There was a hoax in Whatsapp, where in some village in India, people were afraid their kids were going to get kidnapped and then there were these lynchings that happened as a result,” he said. “People were like vigilante running out, they think they’ve found the person. I mean seriously? That’s what we’re dealing with.”

Mr Palihapitiya also described how people “curate” their lives with images of perfection in order to get social approval and validation, but noted that it is short-lived and fake.

“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals — likes, thumbs-up — and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth,” he said. “Instead what it is, is fake, brittle popularity and that leaves you even more vacant and empty.”

Mr Palihapitiya is not the first former Facebook employee to speak out about the state of the world.

Antonio Garcia Martinez, who worked as a product manager at Facebook, predicts a revolution brought on by technology.

“Within 30 years, half of humanity won’t have a job. It could get ugly. There could be a revolution,” he said in a BBC2 documentary earlier this year.