Facebook Inc.’s former vice president for user growth has admitted he now feels bad for what he helped create, saying social media is “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth,” said Chamath Palihapitiya (pictured), who was at Facebook from 2007 to 2011. These remarks were made back in November at a Stanford Business School event, but have just been unearthed by The Verge.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” added Palihapitiya. “I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”

He also said he wasn’t talking about Facebook and Russia propaganda, but more widely how Facebook is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” In a quite dramatic turn of phrase, he told the audience, “If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, you have a chance to control it and rein it in.” He said he doesn’t use Facebook, and as for his kids, they “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”

Palihapitiya is not the first big player from Facebook to denounce the social media giant or social media in general. In November Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, now a proclaimed social media “conscientious objector,” decried how such technology is “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Like Palihapitiya, Parker talked of “unintended consequences” relating to the growth of Facebook and how it has affected society. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker said. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” He added that social media had become a kind of psychological hack, exploiting a vulnerability in the human mind relating to the social validation one might gain from using Facebook.

Palihapitiya also talked about how false messages spread on Facebook-owned WhatsApp earlier this year had led to mob attacks on innocent people in India and subsequently seven deaths. “That’s what we’re dealing with,” he said. “Imagine when you take that to the extreme where bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.”

Image: Stanford Graduate School of Business via YouTube