Sean Parker, Facebook Ex-Exec, Sharply Critical of Social Network

Sean Parker, Facebook's ex-president, was sharply critical of the social network in an interview with Axios posted on Thursday, charging the social network grew knowing that it would absorb too much of people's time and productivity.

Parker, 38, now founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, made his comments at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

"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 two billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other," Parker, a co-founder of Napster, told Axios. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

Parker left Facebook in 2005 after an alleged drug arrest, which was detailed in David Kirkpatrick's book "The Facebook Effect," according to Business Insider. Parker, one of the earliest investors in Facebook, still made more than $2 billion off the social media site when it went public in 2012, according to Fortune.

Parker told Axios that Facebook creators wanted to build applications with the thought in mind: "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," Parker continued. "And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."

Parker said the social media site became sort of a "social-validation feedback loop."

"(Its) exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting vulnerability in human psychology," Parker told Axios. "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."

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