Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared over the weekend that she was giving up Facebook because it was detrimental to one’s health, and one of Facebook’s founders previously agreed.
“I personally gave up Facebook, which was kind of a big deal because I started my campaign on Facebook. And Facebook was my primary digital organizing tool for a very long time. I gave up on it. We still sort of have accounts on it,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Yahoo! News’ podcast, Skullduggery.
“Like, every once in a while, you’ll see me hop on Twitter on the weekends, but for the most part … when it comes to consumption and reading, I take the weekends off,” she continued.
US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-NY) listens as Michael Cohen, attorney for President Trump, testifies before the House Oversight and Reform Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on February 27, 2019. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Former Facebook president Sean Parker spoke at an Axios event in Philadelphia in 2017 and alleged that the founders knew at the time of its creation that they were exploiting “a vulnerability in human psychology.”
“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,” he said, according to The Guardian.
Parker revealed at the event two years ago that one of the main objectives the founders wanted to figure out was, “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
He added, “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.”
A 2017 study from Holly B. Shakya, an Assistant Professor of Global Public Health at UC San Diego, and Nicholas A. Christakis, the director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, published a study in the Harvard Business Review about how a person’s happiness seemingly decreases the higher a person’s Facebook usage is.
It reads in part:
Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being. These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year. We found consistently that both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.