Book

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

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Little, Brown and Company

The Chaos Machine is a 2022 book by New York Times international reporter Max Fisher that draws on years of his own investigative journalism to make a broader argument about social media's design. Fisher traces a pattern he associates with how major platforms' engagement-driven algorithms and recommendation systems interacted with volatile political and ethnic tensions in countries including Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Germany, linking specific real-world episodes of unrest to platform amplification choices rather than presenting them as a single proven cause. The book synthesizes his reporting on WhatsApp-linked rumor spread, Facebook's role in ethnic conflict, and YouTube's recommendation engine into a wider critique of attention-based product design. TechKids Foundation includes it as Fisher's central, book-length statement connecting platform design choices to documented instances of real-world harm, framed here strictly as association rather than diagnosis.

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CITATION

Fisher, Max. The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. Little, Brown and Company, September 6, 2022.

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