Max Fisher
Authors & Journalists · The Chaos Machine (book)
Author of The Chaos Machine, part of the wider tech-criticism reading list behind this library's case against unchecked platform design.
Max Fisher is part of the secondary tier of technology critics the Evidence Library draws on for wider context. His book, The Chaos Machine, is grouped among a broader body of critical writing on how social-media algorithms and design choices shape behavior. Alongside Jaron Lanier, Roger McNamee, Adam Alter, Cal Newport, Sherry Turkle, and Nicholas Carr, his work rounds out the case this library makes for rethinking how platforms are designed and who they affect.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
VIDEOS
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.
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.
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.
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.
How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher — Intelligence Squared
In this 48-minute episode of the British debate-and-ideas podcast Intelligence Squared, technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker interviews Max Fisher about The Chaos Machine in the week of its publication. Fisher lays out how two decades of engagement-optimized design are, in his argument, associated with changes in how people communicate, get news, and form group identities — and how the same recommendation mechanics he reported on abroad are linked to societal-scale polarization. Stokel-Walker, himself an author on YouTube and TikTok, presses Fisher on the strength of the evidence and on what distinguishes documented platform effects from earlier technology scares. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as the book's principal UK launch interview, pairing Fisher with a specialist interviewer rather than a general-interest host.
Numlock Sunday: Max Fisher on The Chaos Machine
In this Numlock Sunday edition, data-journalism newsletter author Walt Hickey interviews Max Fisher about The Chaos Machine, with the full conversation published as a transcript. Fisher walks through the quantitative research he leans on most, including a large deactivation experiment in which people who stayed off Facebook for four weeks reported wellbeing gains he characterizes as roughly a third the effect of going to therapy, alongside meaningful reductions in political polarization. He describes engagement mechanics modeled on intermittent rewards, and connects the amplification of outrage content to the real-world cases — Myanmar, Sri Lanka — from his reporting. Because it is text, the interview doubles as a citable, quotable digest of the book's evidence. TechKids Foundation includes it as the most data-forward of Fisher's launch interviews.
STUDIES
Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match
In this April 2018 New York Times investigation, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reconstruct how anti-Muslim riots unfolded in Sri Lanka and examine the role Facebook's newsfeed played at each stage. Reporting from affected towns, they trace how a viral rumor of a Muslim plot against the Buddhist majority spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they conclude that the platform's engagement-ranked feed was linked to nearly every step from rumor to killing — a pattern they associate with design choices that reward inflammatory content, not with any single post. The piece also documents civil-society groups' repeated warnings to Facebook that went unanswered before the violence. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the foundational field investigations behind Fisher's later book The Chaos Machine.
Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests
In this August 2018 New York Times feature, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher report on University of Warwick research examining every recorded anti-refugee attack in Germany over a two-year span. The researchers found that towns where per-person Facebook use ran unusually high also saw markedly more attacks on refugees — a correlation that held across community types, including otherwise tolerant towns like Altena, and that weakened during local internet outages. Taub and Fisher pair the data with on-the-ground reporting on how the platform's ranking of emotionally charged posts may distort a community's sense of local opinion. The study was not peer reviewed at publication, and the article presents the pattern as an association between heavy platform use and offline violence, not a proven single cause. TechKids Foundation includes it as a key data-driven entry in Fisher's platform-harms series.