Chaos Machine
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World is a 2022 book by New York Times reporter Max Fisher, which explores how social media algorithms, designed to exploit human psychology and maximize engagement, have led to global polarization, misinformation, and violence.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
4mentions
4people
2023–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 2014-15 was when the news feed switched from static, human-written code to machine learning models optimized to maximize ad revenue[1], the models discovering "user attention time" was a far better metric to optimize for than clicks, likes or shares[2]. And what people spent the most "attention time" on was content that triggered raw moral outrage, fear and tribal hostility[3].
This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.
[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent
- It's the same story since at least 2012. It is well documented in the book "The chaos machine" by Max Fisher.
Facebook employees, journalists and psychologists have studied the phenomenon and Facebook's (as well as Youtube's) response is always the typical "We have done something" to calm the protest, but it's never really the case. It's a constant game of deflecting, delaying, diminishing, denying.
- They had been warned by locals in both Burma and Sri Lanka for many months that violent rhetoric was spreading like wildfire through users in those countries, and did nothing about it -- seldom even responding to the people pleading for them to do something.
When Sri Lanka pulled the plug on Facebook as violence was starting to erupt, Facebook did then reach out...to ask why their Sri Lankan traffic had dropped off.
This is documented in a variety of places, but for an excellent write-up of these tragedies I'd recommend The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher.
- Have you ever read “The Chaos Machine” by Max Fisher?
