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F rom anti-vaxxers to the Capitol riot, a US reporter shows how algorithms are pushing users towards more extreme content
Skyrocketing engagement: YouTube, led by Susan Wojcicki, comes in for special criticism
Social media is “hacking our minds” and producing effects that are quite simply maddening. So argues New York Times reporter Max Fisher in his new book The Chaos Machine.
I n less assured hands, this claim might read as hyperbolic and not dissimilar in tenor to the fevered pitch of much online discourse. Fisher, however, is a seasoned journalist who has covered the rise of social media for many years. Unlike online ‘flame wars’ that burn brightly but have the intellectual depth of a puddle, his analysis is well argued, engaging and often necessarily discomforting.
The Chaos Machine’s greatest achievement is perhaps how skilfully it traces seemingly disparate phenomena — Gamergate, QAnon, civil unrest in Myanmar, rising polarisation in the West, thriving anti-vax Facebook groups among many examples — back to the design of social media platforms that prioritise engagement at all costs.
Fisher repeatedly shows Silicon Valley’s reluctance to reign in their creations or acknowledge their downsides. ‘Engagement’ cannot be interfered with, even when it shows a clear predilection for worsening tensions or when it spills spectacularly into the offline world as it did in the January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Cute cat videos or incitement to overthrow a democratically elected government — all is fair in the battle for eyeballs that constitutes the digital attention economy.
Fisher’s experiences as a journalist with rare access to social media executives is revealing. These are, as he says, “conscientious, ultra-qualified people”, yet they seem at a loss when questioned about what appears to be something of an elephant in the room.
“[A]t some point in each interview,” he writes of meetings at Facebook, “when I would ask about dangers that arose not from bad actors misusing the platform but from the platform itself, it would be like a mental wall went up.”
Again and again, these executives emphasise the role of human misbehaviour on social media but fudge a critical element: how these platforms are actively designed to manipulate users’ motivations and experiences to keep them clicking, scrolling, sharing.
Social media companies do not produce a product in a traditional sense. They don’t make hardware; instead, they create vast networks of potential consumers who can be delivered to advertisers and marketers. This design is not happenstance; it is central to the immense wealth and power that these businesses enjoy.
Given this fact, there is something unsettling about this reluctance to openly consider the effects and flaws of their products’ design. Of his visits to Facebook, Fisher writes: “It was like walking into a cigarette factory and having executives tell you they couldn’t understand why people kept complaining about the health impacts of the little cardboard boxes they sold.”
Max Fisher, author of The Chaos Machine. Photo by Francisco Prone
Behind closed doors, though, it would appear that Facebook is aware of its platforms’ issues. As Fisher writes, internal research conducted by the company in 2018 and leaked to the Wall Street Journal, found: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.”
If the algorithms that determine what we see or don’t see on our screens each day were predominantly guided by humans with oversight responsibilities, that would be one thing. However, as Fisher outlines, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms are largely left to their own devices. What exactly these devices are is something activists, tech journalists and researchers are struggling to figure out.
“[N]o one quite knows how the algorithms that govern social media actually work,” Fisher writes. “The systems operate semi-autonomously, their methods beyond human grasp.”
In a blunt sense, algorithms are designed to give users more of what they want. But this bluntness can have negative consequences when that quest for ‘more’ nudges users towards increasingly extreme content. Without the tempering effects of human oversight, this rabbit-hole effect can contribute to marginalisation and radicalisation.
YouTube, led by Susan Wojcicki, comes in for special criticism. Of its shift to an AI-run algorithm and the skyrocketing user engagement that ensued, Fisher writes: “It was as if Coca-Cola stocked a billion soda machines with some AI-designed beverage without a single human checking the bottles’ contents — and if the drink-filling AI was programmed only to boost sales without regard for health or safety.”
The Chaos Machine — subtitled The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World — joins a stable of modern journalism that captures not only the harms of social media in its current guise but also offers potential solutions. At a time when calls for the regulation of platforms is growing ever louder, Fisher makes an urgent, compelling case for change.
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher
Non-fiction: The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher Quercus, 352 pages, hardcover €28, e-book £9.99
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