#Hype machine professional

Anyone who fears that Russia might use Facebook to disrupt the 2020 presidential election, he suggests, is right to do so-but they should also worry about China and Iran.

#Hype machine professional

Aral also includes a fair amount of material that will hold interest mainly for marketers or other professional persuaders-e.g., “Digital ads don’t work nearly as well as they’re advertised.” The author shines, however, when he validates or challenges many popular beliefs about social media. As the author shows how social networks use “psychological, economic, and technical hooks” to lock in and manipulate people, he makes some points covered in books such as Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.

Such attention-grabbing facts abound in this survey of what the author calls “the Hype Machine,” or “the real-time communications ecosystem created by social media,” and how it is changing behavior. In 2018, Aral and two colleagues made headlines when they published a study that found that lies travel faster than truth online. The head of MIT’s Social Analytics lab warns that Facebook and other social media titans are controlling our behavior-and that breaking up the behemoths won’t solve the problem.