Bad for your Health? Salesforce CEO Argues Facebook 'is the New Cigarettes'

Social media may be bad for our health, argues long-time technology reporter/commentator Kara Swisher in the New York Times:

In March of 2018, I interviewed Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, at the top of the company's San Francisco tower. He offered up an astonishing metaphor when I asked him for his take on the impact of social media companies. 'Facebook is the new cigarettes,' Benioff said. 'It's addictive. It's not good for you.' As it did with cigarette companies, 'the government needs to step in,' he added.' The government needs to really regulate what's happening.'

At the time, I thought it was a flashy reach by an executive who often went out on verbal limbs to make brazen points. But today, after the latest series of investigations into the sketchy acts of the social media giant, Benioff seems like Nostradamus. In the past weeks, The Wall Street Journal published 'The Facebook Files' — well reported pieces that rely on whistle-blowers who are now just tossing incriminating documents over the wall at a furious pace. The Journal's series includes: internal reports showing that Facebook was fully aware of Instagram's deleterious impact on the mental health of teen girls, while moving full steam ahead with an Instagram for Kids product; internal documents inferring that the company lied to its independent Oversight Board when it said it gave only a small amount of celebs, pols and other grandees a wide berth to break its rules on the platform while, in fact, the free pass was given to millions; and the latest revelation that Facebook makes people angry, in part because of futile efforts of its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, to stop the endless rage...

[N]owadays the human race seems even more abhorrent, and in many more twisted and amplified ways, and it's because of Facebook, the biggest and least accountable communications and media platform in history.

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