The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt

"The Hype Machine is just a wonderful overview of the social science research on social media. Sinan Aral is a really accomplished computational social scientist, someone who uses the tools of data science to study human behavior. He’s run some of the first and largest studies of things like fake news, or the effect of advertising on shaping human behavior. His work really isn’t about polarization, but about social media more broadly. So he’s interested in how social media shapes business and elections and health in particular. What I like about The Hype Machine is that nearly every claim in the book is supported by some type of evidence. So he’s entering this field of highly speculative debate and saying, ‘Well, here’s what we actually know. We’ve done a study and we know that when we put people on this type of social network, this happens, and when put them on that type of social network that happens.’ So he’s able to do some debunking. For example, the idea that microtargeting, firms like Cambridge Analytica, successfully paved the way for Brexit or the election of Trump. He shows that not only is there not much evidence for those claims, but there’s not much evidence that microtargeting works very well in general. So there are a lot of things in there that I think will surprise readers. He’s still worried that, fundamentally, there is going to be an inevitable conflict between the profit-seeking of large corporations and the interest of democracy. To what extent will these things inevitably collide? I think he would say that we need some kind of government regulation, to help find the sweet spot between letting free markets fix the problem and really recognizing that this is a unique challenge that we’ve never faced before. We’re in a communications environment that has been completely upended in the last 20 years. Yes. We have slightly different views on this issue. He did a study that showed that fake news travels faster than real news and that provoked a lot of concern. One issue that I have with that study is that a lot of the fake news that they tracked was fake news that had already been identified by factchecking websites. And so not only does that miss a lot—other types of fake news that might be less prominent, for example, because a piece of fake news has to rise to a certain level of prominence before it’s tracked by one of these websites—but, also, the study doesn’t effectively differentiate between people who are unknowingly spreading the information in the fake news and people who are condemning the fake news. So my overall sense is that I’m much less concerned about fake news and misinformation than he is."