Sean Parker, who was Facebook’s founding president alongside its creator Mark Zuckerberg, has revealed how social media have been specifically designed to prey on human weaknesses.
Since leaving the company Mr Parker admitted he has become “something of a conscientious objector” on social media.
He said: “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?
“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.”
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“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.
“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.
He jokingly added that Mark Zuckerberg will probably block his account after reading his comments.
Mr Parker was played by Justin Timberlake and Zuckerberg by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network in 2010.
He said: “When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’
“And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, ‘We’ll get you eventually’.
“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 2billion people and… it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways.
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Mr Parker first entered the media scene when he co-founded Napster, a free internet service for sharing music files, in 1999.
Napster was entered in Guinness World Records as the fastest-growing business of all time but was shut down after 20 months amid legal challenges from the recording industry.
His official tenure with Facebook lasted only a year before a suspected-cocaine scandal forced him out as president in 2005, although he remained integral to its operations.