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 The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media  
Rewired Our Minds and Our World | Hardcover

Max Fisher

Little, Brown and Company

Social Science / Sociology - Social Theory / Business & Economics / Industries
- Computers & Information Technology / Psychology / Social Psychology

Published Sep 6, 2022

"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, have led to a  
destabilized world for everyone.

"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.

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