Media giants such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter claim to champion free speech, unite people and make the world a better place.  In his new book (2022) Max Fisher provides a compelling, if not frightening, argument that these media platforms have failed in their stated missions, and are contributing to a world polarized, not by fact based truth, but by misinformation, anger, threats and fear.

His opening chapters reveal why social media can become addictive.  He calls this phenomenon the “casino effect.”  Receiving “likes” and having our posts shared provides a dopamine rush akin to hitting the play again button on a slot machine. The platforms and their algorithms are designed to utilize habit forming features. Like Pavlov’s dog we gradually get hooked on checking for the next social media hit.  He states that the average American checks their smartphone 150 times a day, often to check social media.

Early on, social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube began to realize that the number of posts, likes and shares equated to increased activity, advertising, and financial gains.  To fuel this increased use, algorithms were devised to become increasingly more effective.  They automated.  Once you show an interest in a topic, the algorithm automatically nudges you to similar feeds that become more radical with each hit; you start going down the “rabbit hole.”  It leads to radicalization via the recommendation machine.  If you started searching for information on COVID/hoax, you would soon arrive at sites that claim the pandemic was created by governments to sell more vaccines and implant mind control chips in your forehead!

The algorithms were built to play on human emotion, more responsive to posts that contained inflammatory language and moral outrage.  The algorithms track your every watch and what you click next and how long you stay on any given site.  It the pulls users to ever more titillating variations of their interests.  It escalates.  The more extreme the content the greater tendency it has to polarize people.  We see this happening in the United States with the MAGA movement and to a lesser extent with Poilievre and Trudeau in Canada.

The algorithms  are not designed to encourage thoughtful conversations.

In the professed spirit of free speech,  little or inadequate monitoring is in place to censure and/or block some of the most hateful and misleading posts.

I personally know people who tell me that when it comes to issues such as the pandemic and global warming, they do their own research online.  When I ask which web sites they use, they say they use Facebook and YouTube because there are more users, and they are more likely to find the truth.  Some of these people are what Fisher calls “super posters.”  I had one acquaintance that was reposting up to 15 times a day on material that was radical, harmful, inaccurate misinformation.  A couple of hits into a Michelle Obama search will lead you to sites that claim she is a man.

Most frightening are the chapters dealing with the use of social media to mobilize people to protest and to action.  Heavy users who have gone down the rabbit hole are inclined to enter a psychological state of “disindividualization,” a fancy term for a mob mentality.  The January 6, 2021, mob attach on the American capital was organized on social media platforms; there was no one official leader.  We saw a similar mobilization in Canada with the Freedom Truck Convoy affair in Ottawa.

The final chapters of The Chaos Machine provide an overview of how government inquiries and protests from staff at Facebook are trying to curtail the unchecked, uncensored algorithms that continue to radicalize some of societies most disturbed citizens.  Facebook currently is defending itself against civil lawsuits contending the  social media platform’s business practices have resulted in personal harm and injury.

The topic of global warming came up while I was golfing with a friend of mine this past summer.  He told me that global warming was a hoax perpetuated by governments.  When I asked him how he came to that conclusion, he shared that he had found on Facebook 12 studies conducted in Great Britain that supported that position.  I rest my case.

This book deserves to be read widely and shared with others.

Enjoy the read.