For hundreds of millions of users, Facebook's appeal is its ability to help users keep in touch with a wide web of family, friends and acquaintances worldwide.

But the company's founding president Sean Parker had told US website Axios that the thought process behind social networks like Facebook is actually more sinister.

In fact, he says, it is all about trying to "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible".

"And that means that we need to sorts 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 and that's going to get you to contribute more content and that's going to get you more likes and comments," he said.

Mr Parker said that creates a social validation feedback loop, noting that it is "exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with".

"You're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology," he said.

"And I just think the inventors, the creators — it's me, it's Mark, it's Kevin Systrom (the inventor of Instagram) — all these people understood this consciously and we did it anyway."

Dr Tim Highfield, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Queensland University of Technology's Digital Media Research Centre, said Facebook's understanding of human psychology is factored into how it operates and presents information.

"So the default for seeing content on Facebook is not that we see it in any kind of of timeline, we don't see it as the most recent post, it gives you more content that you scroll through that then allows it to target more advertising at you," he told the ABC's PM program.

'God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains'

Sean Parker says the thought process behind social networks like Facebook is actually more sinister. ( Reuters: Dado Ruvic )

Mr Parker became Facebook's first president after making hundreds of millions of dollars from the music-sharing service Napster.

The 37-year-old billionaire was pressured out of the company in 2005. He has since gone on to work at music service Spotify, and is now a full-time philanthropist.

"[Facebook] 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.

But Dr Highfield says it hard to know what impact this is having because "we don't know necessarily how people are using the platforms".

"There's a lot of moral panic around kids spending too much time on screens or kids spending too much time online, not being social, not getting outside," he said.

"But it's less about Facebook, less about any one platform, and it's more about understanding what people are doing with these platforms, what kids are doing.

"You need to be able to put in your own personal limitations and know how to use things sensibly — it's the same kind of thing for any kind of digital media and it's less about Facebook itself."

It has been a difficult few months for the company, which has faced criticism for showing Russian ads that aimed to influence the US election.

Facebook's vice-president of advertising, Rob Goldman, was also forced to deny claims last month that the social media network uses microphones on users' devices to eavesdrop on conversations so it can better target advertisements.