--- title: "Former Employee: We Made Facebook as Addictive as Cigarettes on Purpose" description: "According to former Facebook employee Tim Kendall, the company worked like big tobacco to be as addictive as possible. Find out why." date: "2020-09-25" modified: "2020-09-30" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/former-facebook-employee-addictive-cigarettes" categories: - "Future Society" tags: - "addiction" - "facebook" - "social media" - "the digest" --- # Former Employee: We Made Facebook as Addictive as Cigarettes on Purpose ![Facebook's former head of monetization says that his former employer, like big tobacco companies, worked to make its product as addictive as possible.]() *\Image: Pixabay/Futurism\* ## Big Tobacco Facebook's former head of monetization, Tim Kendall, unloaded on the social media giant during a [hearing about social media's role in spreading extremist content]() — saying that his former employer, like big tobacco companies, worked to make its product as addictive as possible. "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible," he said. "We took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset." ## Zuck Fix Kendall, who worked for Facebook during the pivotal growth years from 2006 to 2010, said that the tech giant made upgrades to the site designed specifically to keep users coming back for more. "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent," he said. "But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis." ## Civil War Now, he said, the chickens have come home to roost, with the addictive platform spreading harmful content at scale. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding — at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." **READ MORE:** [Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook”]() \[*Ars Technica*\] **More on Facebook:** *[Report: Gene-Hacking Plants and Animals Could Fight Climate Change]()* ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()