Play Book Tag discussion

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher - 5* - My Review

“Like many, I had initially assumed social media’s dangers came mostly from misuse by bad actors: propogandists, foreign agents, fake news peddlers, and that at worst, the various platforms were a passive conduit for society’s preexisting problems; but virtually everywhere I traveled in my reporting, covering far-off despots, wars, and upheavals, strange and extreme events kept getting linked back to social media.“

This book examines the role social media has played in the rise of conspiracy theories, racism, nationalism, disinformation, hate speech, outrage, polarization, and fear. It goes into detail about social media’s role in the:
- Genocide in Myanmar
- Sectarian violence and deaths in Sri Lanka
- Anti-refugee violence in Germany
- January 6th insurrection in the US

Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Google, Instagram, Twitter (and several others) are called out specifically for contributions to the trends toward radicalization and the increase in “us versus them” mentality that is so obvious to anyone who spends time on these sites. The bottom line is that the more outrageous content keeps engagement levels high, and this is the metric the social media companies are using to measure success. One of the most disturbing aspects is the priority placed on profits over all else.

“Social media platforms surfaced whatever content their automated systems had concluded would maximize users’ activity online, thereby allowing the company to sell more ads.”

“This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity and is so pervasive in our lives that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another.”

The author presents his case through a mountain of documentation he has gathered from insiders and research. This evidence is presented within the narrative and in the book’s end notes. Recommended to anyone who regularly participates in social media to understand what algorithms and machine learning are doing to society, and how they are engineered to direct users’ attention to more extreme content, regardless of whether or not it is true.