The Chaos Machine

The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher

Hardcover, 400 pages

English language

Published Jan. 26, 2022 by Little Brown & Company.

ISBN:: 978-0-316-70332-1

(3 reviews)

From a New York Times investigative reporter, this “authoritative and devastating account of the impacts of social media” (New York Times Book Review) tracks the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world. The Chaos Machine is “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein).

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, …

Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.

8 editions

KnitAFett reviewed The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

Very information heavy in a good way.

5 stars

This was a really fantastic informative piece. It covers how social media has changed from its origins, heavily focusing on facebook and youtube with twitter and even reddit thrown into a mix. Max does a great job explaining how the algorithms that these companies have utilized helped to desensitize and encourage people to adapt far right thoughts and lifestyles. There is also coverage of how social media algorithms have helped encourage people to find underage children attractive. Nasty stuff, but the information needs to be out there. The Trump and Bolsonaro elections are covered, of coarse, with the Trump coverage leading up to January 6th. He also covers how social media played crucial roles in protests and talks about the negatives that came along with the positives.

A lot of what was in here, I already knew. But there were a lot of holes that were filled. I knew facebook …

A lot of what was in here, I already knew. But there were a lot of holes that were filled. I knew facebook was a main source for spreading false information, but I had no idea how much yotube played into all of it. There is a surprising amount of harsh language in the form of quotes from posts, so just beware.

Noisy Deadlines reviewed Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

Lots of inside information and the harms of social media

4 stars

This is a very in depth presentation of facts on how technology can impact society and social movements. It describes in detail how Facebook aimed to increase the number of friends users had (they wanted to surpass the Dunbar limit of 150) by enforcing it through changes in their algorithms. Then it discusses the Trump election and the rise of right-wing posts, videos and groups in social media. Chapters 4 and 5 covers the rise of machine learning algorithms and how all platforms started promoting and amplifying more outrageous/radical content. And how the average user's time on these platforms skyrocketed around 2016. And then, Trump's and Bolsonaro's election in the USA and Brazil respectively, which were fuelled by social media. The rise of alt-right movements. The pandemic and all the misinformation campaigns during that period. It’s a full exposition of how social media had real life dire consequences.

SocProf reviewed The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

The problem with social media platforms is social media platforms

5 stars

That is the main thesis of the book: that the algorithms deployed by giants like Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter do not just allow like-minded people to find each other but that they actively push people together into extremist bubbles through their recommendation engines, up to and including genocide (as in Myanmar and Sri Lanka). The book goes through what seems to be considered now the origin story of radicalization and harassment via social media: gamergate. Things got worse from there, all the way to the January 6th attempted coup. The throughline is how social media platforms algorithmically push people towards extremism and outrage (which is more likely to be found on the right... see Irony and Outrage on this) because outrage keeps people glued to the platforms. The platforms want people on as much as possible, and if the way to get it is to destroy democracy, spread disinformation, destroy any chance at public health, and violence, then so be it. Throughout the book, Fisher shows how the platform leaders knew the impact of their algorithm and did nothing, as one extremist event unfolded after another, rooted on the platforms, and yet they did nothing because the business model demands this. So it is not simply extremists finding each other actively on social media, it is social media pushing not just extremists but regular people into extremists groups or channels for the sake attention and data. It is deeply depressing and yet important. And because the platforms have learned nothing (and rolled back some of the measures they reluctantly took in 2020), we can expect more as the 2024 US presidential election approaches. All the more reasons to get off these platforms.

The Chaos Machine

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