‘Addictive’ social media should be regulated like cigarettes, tech CEO says

Social media platforms are so addictive and potentially harmful to their users that governments should regulate them “exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry,” according to the CEO of Salesforce.

“Here’s a product: Cigarettes. They’re addictive, they’re not good for you,” CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC during an interview on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “For sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address.”

Benioff founded Salesforce, a San Francisco-based cloud computing company, in 1999. As the company’s leader, Benioff is worth an estimated $4 billion, the Guardian reports.

During his Davos interview, Benioff, 53, also said that more regulation in the technology industry is all but assured, just as regulation is commonplace in food, financial services and other industries. Benioff said the need for more regulation in social media is pressing.

“[P]roduct designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back,” Benioff told CNBC.

Benioff even Tweeted about his comments after the event, adding that social media’s “power to influence is still greatly underestimated.”

Benioff isn’t the first tech leader to express skepticism about social media’s role in the world, either.

In November, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth said that the social media company he used to work for — and others — are “destroying how society works,” as McClatchy reported in December.

“You don’t realize it, but you are being programmed,” Chamath Palihapitiya said at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event, alluding to how “likes” that friends can give on posts drive addictive user engagement. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.”

Palihapitiya, who worked at the company until leaving in 2011 to start a venture capital endeavor, added that he feels “tremendous guilt” for his role in creating the social media behemoth as it exists today.

“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” Palihapitiya said.

Social media companies are facing more and more scrutiny as questions persist about how Facebook, Twitter and other top social networking platforms may have shaped the 2016 election campaign. Russian-linked posts on Facebook reached 126 million Americans during the campaign, The Verge reported in October. That’s roughly half of all Facebook users in the country.

Facebook has 2 billion users around the world as of June 2017, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the social network last year.

There are about 7.5 billion people in the world, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, has also spoken about reservations he has with the rise of social media — describing himself as “something of a conscientious objector” to the platforms.

“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 2 billion people and it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker said at an event hosted by the media company Axios in November.

This story was originally published January 24, 2018 at 3:41 PM with the headline "‘Addictive’ social media should be regulated like cigarettes, tech CEO says."