When you go to Google and type, "climate change is," you're going to see different results depending on where you live and the things Google knows about your interests. That's not by accident, that's a design. What I want people to know is that everything they're doing online is being watched, is being tracked. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. A lot of people think Google's just a search box, Facebook's a place to see what friends are doing. They don't realize there's entire teams of engineers whose job is to use your psychology against you. I was the co-inventor of the Facebook like button. -I was president of Pinterest. -Google. -Twitter. -Instagram. There were meaningful changes happening around the world because of these platforms. I think we were naive about the flip side of that coin. We get rewarded by hearts, likes, thumbs up. And we conflate that with value and with truth. A whole generation is more anxious, more depressed. I always felt like fundamentally it was a force for good. I don't know if I feel that way anymore.
Facebook discovered that they were able to affect real-world behavior and emotions without ever triggering the users' awareness. They are completely clueless. Fake news spreads six times faster than true news. We're being bombarded with rumors. If everyone's entitled to their own facts, there's no need for people to come together. There's no need for people to interact. We have less control over who we are and what we really believe.
If you want to control the population of a country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook. We built these things, and we have a responsibility to change it. The intention could be, "How do we make the world better?" If technology creates mass chaos, loneliness, more polarization, more election hacking, more inability to focus on the real issues, we're toast. This is checkmate on humanity.
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