Facebook is the new cigarettes. You know, it's addictive. It's not good for you. There's people trying to get you to use it that even you don't understand what's going on. The government needs to step in. The government needs to really regulate what's happening.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, in a comment on MSNBC in 2018.
That three-year-old quote was brought to my attention by Kara Swisher in a recent New York Times column.
She apparently agrees more with Marc Benioff now than she did in 2018.
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.
Obviously, you don’t get claps for doing your job. Nor should you get credit when you do the very least to fix problems like these.
So, sadly, I am coming around to the idea that Benioff’s once-over-the-top metaphor — that social media companies like Facebook are as bad for us as cigarette companies — might not be so far off the mark.
As it turns out, the Facebook/tobacco comparison was more than a metaphor.
Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook”
Just as tobacco is a threat to physical health, Facebook and some other forms of social media are likely a threat to our collective mental health.
We need a thorough study regarding Facebook and similar platforms comparable to the Surgeon General’s 1964 landmark report on smoking and health.
When we have a clearer and more scientific picture of the damage caused by social media, it can be regulated like any other potentially harmful phenomenon.
For now, there’s nothing to stop you from going cold turkey. Leave Facebook. Delete Facebook. Quit Facebook.
