A gathering of Silicon Valley alumni and Washington lobbyists warns of the links between tech addiction, anxiety, obesity and depression

The leaders of Facebook should consider their own children when they make decisions that could harm millions of young people hooked on the social network, activists said on Wednesday.

A gathering of Silicon Valley alumni and whistleblowers and Washington lobbyists in the US capital heard warnings of potential links between tech addiction and sleep disruption, poor academic performance, anxiety, depression, obesity, social isolation and suicide.

Conference organiser James Steyer, chief executive and founder of Common Sense Media, a not-for-profit promoting safe technology and media for children, criticised giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. He said: “Talk is cheap. Show me the money. Period.”



Former Facebook and Google workers launch campaign to fight tech addiction Read more

There were pleas for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder and chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, to apply values they advocate for their own families. Steyer added: “Mark and Sheryl at Facebook are good people. They are parents too. They have to think about their own kids when making a big picture decision there.”

Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, echoed this sentiment. He said: “What I’d like [Sheryl Sandberg] to do is to bring the same values she has at home into the office. Remember that you have to have empathy. If you view your users as fuel stock for your profits you’re not going to make the world a better place.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The message to Mark Zuckerberg was ‘think about your own kids’. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

McNamee is among a group of former tech employees behind the Center for Humane Technology, committed to “reversing the digital attention crisis and realigning technology with humanity’s best interests”, raising alarms about the effects of smartphones and social networks on people’s emotional and intellectual development. Their lobbying campaign to combat tech addiction is reminiscent of past anti-smoking drives, with adverts targeting 55,000 schools in the US.

As a backlash against Silicon Valley gathers momentum, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff last month called for Facebook to be regulated like a cigarette company because of the addictive and harmful properties of social media.

McNamee said: “Marketing was used to convince a whole generation, particularly women, that smoking was a really good thing for them. Franklin Foer in his book [World Without Mind: the Existential Threat of Big Tech] talks about how after the second world war the convenience was applied to food, so we went to TV dinners and nobody told us they were loading them up with sugar fat and salt and now we have an obesity epidemic. I hope it’s not too late here.”

It starts to really go deep into them and actually redefine their identity and their meaning of friendship Tristan Harris, former Google ethicist

McNamee was one of the speakers at a Truth About Tech conference in Washington on Wednesday. Among the issues raised was how school teachers use Facebook groups for homework assignments, making it unavoidable for many pupils.

Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and founder of the Center for Humane Technology, was introduced by Steyer as “the first major whistleblower who came out of the really key Silicon Valley companies to come forward and say, ‘Some of what we’re doing is really not OK”

Harris said he saw how Google’s Gmail service was “hijacking the mind”. He warned of the “existential threat” posed by a digital world that is completely unregulated “like the wild west: build a casino wherever you want”.

In an interview, Harris pointed to examples such as Snapchat streaks which shows the number of days in a row that each teenager has communicated with each friend. “It creates this false sense of, ‘I’ve got to keep this thing going’,” he said. “It starts to really go deep into them and actually redefine their identity and their meaning of friendship. They think that they’re not friends if they don’t keep that streak going.”

Harris said he was hopeful media pressure can force reform. “We just have to get clear about what we don’t like.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘They treated children as basically an opportunity to get customers at a very young age.’ Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

Sandy Parakilas, an operations manager on the platform team at Facebook, said he became concerned about the impact on children and how their interests appeared to be secondary. “My opinion is that they treated the opportunity of children as basically an opportunity to get customers at a very young age,” he said.

“I think there is very clearly a negative impact. I don’t think these companies have the business incentive to regulate themselves. They need some external pressure and regulation”

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Read more

Aza Raskin, a veteran of Mozilla and Firefox who is now chief strategy officer at the Center for Humane Technology, said: “We end up replacing children’s sense of identity and self-worth with how many likes they get.”

Raskin said the tech sector’s conduct is worse than that of cigarette manufacturers.

He said: “Tobacco only gets so addictive and tobacco doesn’t know anything particularly about you or your habits. ... Imagine three years or five years from now when our new digital tobacco knows all of your habits. That’s the world that we’re thinking about, like if you think about when you point AI [artificial intelligence] at a chessboard. Once it wins, it wins; humans can never get better.”