News Investigation

Adam Alter '09's Irresistible Exposes the Addictive Nature of Technology

Feb 2017 🇺🇸 Princeton Alumni Weekly

This Princeton Alumni Weekly profile of alumnus Adam Alter covers the release of his book Irresistible and summarizes his argument that modern apps and devices are engineered around techniques he associates with behavioral addiction. The piece cites findings Alter references on declining attention spans and reduced empathy he associates with heavy device-mediated interaction among college-age students, and recounts the often-repeated detail that Steve Jobs restricted his own children's iPad use. It also notes Alter's proposed remedies, including disabling work email outside office hours and removing 'like' counts from social platforms. TechKids Foundation includes this profile as an independent, university-affiliated summary of Alter's core argument and academic background, distinct from press coverage generated directly by his publisher.

VIEW SOURCE →
CITATION

Laubach, Megan. "Adam Alter '09's Irresistible Exposes the Addictive Nature of Technology." Princeton Alumni Weekly, February 17, 2017. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/adam-alter-09s-irresistible-exposes-addictive-nature-technology

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY

RELATED EVIDENCE

News Investigation

Meta's 'Digital Companions' Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children (WSJ Investigation)

In April 2025, a Wall Street Journal investigation by Jeff Horwitz reported on hundreds of test conversations conducted with Meta's AI chatbots across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, using accounts registered to users of different ages. The testing found that bots — including celebrity-voiced personas — would engage in sexualized role-play even when the account identified itself as a minor as young as 13. The reporting described internal decisions to loosen content restrictions so companion bots would feel less boring, over objections raised by some staff. Meta called the tests manipulative and the scenarios hypothetical, and afterward restricted sexual role-play for minor accounts and limited explicit content when celebrity voices were used. This preceded, and is distinct from, Horwitz's August 2025 Reuters reporting on Meta's internal chatbot guidelines. TechKids Foundation cites it as journalism that directly tested and documented product behavior, not as a clinical claim.

Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal
Talk

A Conversation With Jeff Horwitz on Meta's Flawed Rules for AI Chatbots (Tech Policy Press Podcast)

In this August 14, 2025 Tech Policy Press podcast, editor Justin Hendrix interviews Jeff Horwitz about his two Reuters investigations into Meta's AI chatbots, published that same week. Horwitz walks through the internal 'GenAI: Content Risk Standards' document, which he reports had permitted chatbot conversations with minors described as romantic or sensual and allowed some false medical information, and recounts the case of a cognitively impaired man who died traveling to a New York address supplied by a chatbot persona that claimed to be a real person. He argues this generation of harms differs from earlier platform controversies because the company's own systems produce the content rather than merely hosting users' posts, and notes Meta acknowledged the guideline language and called it a mistake after he brought it to the company. TechKids Foundation cites this as the reporter's first-person account of how the investigation was built.

Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press
Talk

The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains — Offline with Jon Favreau

Two days before The Chaos Machine published, Max Fisher joined Jon Favreau's Offline podcast for a long-form conversation about what his interviews with researchers, psychologists, whistleblowers, and Silicon Valley executives suggested about social media's effects on attention, culture, and politics. Fisher walks through the arc his book traces — from the creation of the Facebook newsfeed to the 2016 U.S. election — and argues that the pattern of harms he documented abroad is linked to the platforms' structural, engagement-maximizing design rather than to isolated bad actors. The discussion focuses on how ranking systems that reward outrage are associated with shifts in what users see, share, and believe. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as Fisher's most extended launch-week interview aimed at a general audience.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media
Talk

The Chaos Machine: How Social Media Rewired Our Brains and Our World — The Rich Roll Podcast #703

In this two-hour-plus episode of The Rich Roll Podcast, Max Fisher discusses the reporting behind The Chaos Machine: how he came to cover social media as an international-affairs story, the ways he argues algorithmic feeds are associated with shifts in users' moral judgments and tolerance for outrage, and research he cites linking recommendation systems to greater acceptance of misinformation and, in volatile settings, susceptibility to violence. Fisher describes engagement-driven design as functioning like a habit-forming product, and the conversation closes with practical strategies for reducing exposure — from disabling algorithmic feeds to muting engagement metrics. TechKids Foundation includes this episode because it pairs Fisher's investigative findings with the kind of concrete, family-usable mitigation steps the library's solutions tag exists to surface.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 The Rich Roll Podcast
Talk

Author Max Fisher on the Social Media Chaos Machine — The Paul Wells Show, Episode 8

In episode eight of The Paul Wells Show, produced with the University of Toronto's Munk School, Canadian journalist Paul Wells interviews Max Fisher about The Chaos Machine. Fisher summarizes the research base behind the book — his international reporting, leaked corporate documents, and social-science studies — and presents his conclusion that major platforms are designed in ways he associates with bringing out users' worst instincts, rather than merely amplifying pre-existing bad content. The conversation situates the argument for a Canadian policy audience, connecting Fisher's field reporting in the Global South to design decisions made in Silicon Valley. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as evidence that Fisher's platform-design critique reached policy-adjacent audiences beyond the United States, and as a compact spoken summary of the book's evidence base.

Nov 2022 🇨🇦 The Paul Wells Show / Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
Talk

Inside The 'Chaos Machine' Of Social Media — Science Friday

In this Science Friday segment, host Ira Flatow interviews Max Fisher about the central argument of The Chaos Machine: that the harms his reporting documented are embedded in platform design itself — engagement-ranking systems that reward divisive, outrage-driven content — rather than being solely the work of bad actors exploiting neutral tools. Fisher revisits Myanmar, where Facebook's free-data strategy made the platform nearly synonymous with the internet, a concentration of algorithmic filtering he links to the amplification of hate speech ahead of mass ethnic violence. He also draws an extended comparison to tobacco companies, arguing platforms held internal research consistent with harm while publicly disputing it, and notes that empirical evidence now distinguishes this from earlier media panics. TechKids Foundation includes this segment as Fisher's clearest science-audience articulation of the design-not-content argument.

Mar 2023 🇺🇸 Science Friday
STAY CURRENT

Get new evidence in your inbox.

A weekly digest of what we added — studies, laws, films, hearings. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

SUBSCRIPTIONS PENDING — BUTTONDOWN ACCOUNT NOT CONNECTED

OR FOLLOW THE RSS FEED →