Summary of Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350063530

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Summary of Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine

Contents

Overview

The Culprits

The Psychology of Social Media

The Force of Identity

The Myanmar rioting

Gamergate

From 4chan to 8chan

A Wake-up Call

The Uses of Outrage

Unsupervised Algorithms

Identifying Hidden Forces

Reshaping Our Nature

Facebook-Aided Genocide

The Sri Lanka Outbreak

The Psychology of Communal Violence

The Rabbit Hole

Infodemic

The Road to January 6

The Solution: Turn It Off

About the Author

Overview

The conventional wisdom that social media brings out the worst in people is accurate, but it doesn’t go far enough. In The Chaos Machine (2022), international reporter Max Fisher uncovers just how deeply and negatively social media has affected our world. Big tech companies have allowed their unsupervised algorithms to exploit weaknesses in the human mind, earning them billions of dollars by spreading misinformation and hate speech. Fisher provides a chilling exploration of the role social media played in the rise of Trumpism and far-right extremism, the genocides in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and much more.

The Culprits

Many people assume that the dangers of social media come from misuse by propagandists, foreign agents, and peddlers of fake news, and that the platforms are a passive conduit for society’s preexisting problems. However, there is a pattern that links virtually all recent wars, upheavals, and other extreme events back to social media. The dangers of social media arise not only from people misusing the platform but also from the platform itself.

Facebook executives insist that they have policies and methods in place to block terrorists from recruiting on the platform, outmaneuver hostile government hackers, and determine which combinations of words constitute an unacceptable incitement to violence. Yet these problems only seem to get worse.

Facebook appears to be oblivious to the fact that its algorithms purposefully skew users’ incentives and experiences. An example of this is the QAnon movement. A 4chan user, going by the username Q