Former Tech Exec: Silicon Valley Pumps Money Into ‘Useless, Idiotic Companies’ [WATCH]

Former Facebook vice president of user growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, said he feels “tremendous guilt” for helping create the social media age that captivates so much of our lives, and called out Silicon Valley investors for frivolously spending money on “shitty, useless,” companies.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” Palihapitiya told a crowd gathered at Stanford Business School, CNBC reported Monday. “I think we all knew in the back of our minds … we kind of knew something bad could happen.”

“It literally is to a point now that we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said. “If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and reign it in.”

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said. “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.”

WATCH:

The former Facebook exec told the audience to go look through the database of “shitty, useless, idiotic” tech companies “that have gotten funding” over initiatives like “climate change.”

Palihapitiya isn’t the only former Facebook executive to speak out against the social media site they helped create.

Sean Parker, a founding president of Facebook, voiced his concerns with the growing power of social media companies in November.

“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?’” Parker told Axios in an interview. “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.”

Follow Robert on Twitter

Send tips to robert@dailycallernewsfoundation.org

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.