The hype machine: how social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health--and how we must adapt, hardcover/sinan aral

A landmark insiders 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 The most important book of the year .

a lively, engaging masterpiece.

--Erik Brynjolfsson, bestselling co-author of The Second Machine Age MIT professor Sinan Aral isnt only one of the worlds leading experts on social media--hes also an entrepreneur and investor, giving him an unparalleled 360-degree view of the technologys 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 Twitters and Facebooks 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.

About author(s): Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT, and Data Science at MIT; director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; and head of MITs Social Analytics Lab.

He is an active entrepreneur and venture capitalist who served as chief scientist at several startups; co-founded Manifest Capital, a VC fund that grows startups into the Hype Machine; and worked closely with Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, and The New York Times , among other companies.

He currently serves on the advisory boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Norway, and C6 Bank, Brazils first all-digital bank.