The Hype Machine

How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health - and How We Must Adapt

By: Sinan Aral

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical ideas on how to protect ourselves in the 2020 election and beyond.

MIT Professor Sinan Aral isn’t only one of the world’s leading experts on social media - he’s also an entrepreneur and investor, giving him an unparalleled 360-degree view of the technology’s great promise as well as its outsize capacity to damage our politics, our economy, and even our personal health. Drawing on two decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the biggest, most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse.

Aral shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior-influencing levers to both Russian hackers and brand marketers - to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act - which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth to the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids.

In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

This audiobook includes a bonus PDF of figures and graphs.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Sinan Aral (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“This is the most important book of the year! Our friendships, economy, and society now depend on billions of social media connections, and no one on the planet understands them better than Sinan Aral.... A lively, engaging masterpiece.” (Erik Brynjolfsson, best-selling coauthor of The Second Machine Age)

“The Hype Machine is a riveting story of social media’s impact on how we live. Part spy novel and part science thriller, this book is an essential guide to ensuring our digital future.” (Jonah Berger, best-selling author of Contagious)

“An immensely interesting, informative, and provocative look at the biggest technological questions of our time, and the future of our democracy.” (Eli Pariser, best-selling author of The Filter Bubble)

Listen to this book

The threat is more than real it’s happening and if it’s not used properly the hype machine will be our downfall. This book is a great introduction to what the powers and dangers of the digital world are and how if left under the control of self interest groups that control big tech our society will no longer exist as a free state.

Important information

I appreciate how this was well researched and organized to give well articulated explanations and suggestions for the personal and societal changes we are experiencing. It is vital that we take action, and this book equips us toward doing that.

A seminal work

Anyone looking to better understand the works of social media on our society and what we need to do to fix it must read this book.grounded in sconce but also real business experience it is provides excellent guidance and realistic suggestions for policy-makers.

Current and inspires the reader.

This book really depicts such a complex reality in simple way, it also inspires the reader to the urgency of social media matters, technology is neither good or bad, it is what we made of it.

This is not what science is about :(

Sian Aral is an investor and a businessman, one has to respect him for that. However he is not a scientist. His mind is already set.
The book is very persuasive one sided narration....a propaganda to justify the incoming control and censure in social media.

It was ok

The analysis is good and the book is well written but it is almost too politically oriented to be of actual interest to me as a reader.