Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

WALKING INTO FACEBOOKS headquarters can feel like entering the Vatican: a center of power shrouded in secrecy and opulence that would shame a Russian oligarch. The company had spent $300 million alone on building number 21, an airy steel and glass playground of gardens, patios, and everything-is-free restaurants that I visited in late 2018. Between meetings, a two-story mural on a back wall caught my eye, reminding me of a famous Chinese artist whod recently been featured at the Guggenheim Museum. I asked the PR rep who was minding me if it had been deliberately painted in his style. She laughed politely. It was no mimicry; the artist had been flown in to do an original on Facebooks walls. So had dozens of other artists. All around me fabulously paid programmers hustled down hallways adorned by priceless murals.

In my bag, stuffed between notepads, was my ticket in: 1,400-plus pages of internal documents, from regions across the globe, that revealed Facebooks unseen hand in setting the bounds of acceptable politics and speech for two billion users worldwide. To the insider whod leaked them to me, the files were evidence of the companys sloppiness and shortcuts in trying to stem the growing global turmoil that he believed its products exacerbated, or even caused. To me, they were even more than that. They were a window into how Facebooks leadership thought about the consequences of social medias rise.

Like many, I had initially assumed social medias dangers came mostly from misuse by bad actorspropagandists, foreign agents, fake-news peddlersand that at worst the various platforms were a passive conduit for societys preexisting problems. But virtually everywhere I traveled in my reporting, covering far-off despots, wars, and upheavals, strange and extreme events kept getting linked back to social media. A sudden riot, a radical new group, widespread belief in some oddball conspiracyall had a common link. And though America had yet to explode into violence, the similarities to what was happening back home were undeniable. Every week there was another story of a Twitter conspiracy overtaking national politics, a Reddit subculture drifting into neo-Nazism, a YouTube addict turning to mass murder.

And Donald Trumps unexpected victory in 2016 had been attributed, in part, to social media. Though the role of the platforms remained poorly understood, it was already clear that Trumps rise had been abetted by strange new grassroots movements and hyperpartisan outlets that thrived online, as well as Russian agents whod exploited social medias reality-distorting, identity-indulging tendencies. This global pattern seemed to indicate something fundamental to the technology, but exactly what that was, why it was happening, or what it meant, nobody was able to tell me.