The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt. Sinan Aral. New York, NY: Random House, 2020.

Social media is now an essential tool for communication. The onset of social media has brought significant changes to how people talk to each other, from people interacting predominantly within their own small circles to the possibility of airing views and thoughts to others around the world with just a press of a button. Social media has become essential to what makes modern human life more intertwined with each other. Nevertheless, these intertwinings come at an unseen cost. A cost that most of the users of social media seldom realise. As the saying goes, if you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product.

The Hype Machine by Professor Sinan Aral remains relevant to a wide variety of domains, especially military policy and strategy.

These often hidden costs now play a significant role in local and international politics, markets, health, security, and more. Therefore, it becomes essential to keep a check on social media to ensure a balance between the users and the platforms so these interactions do not lead to violence or exploitation of the user’s data while platforms generate revenue. The Hype Machine by Professor Sinan Aral remains relevant to a wide variety of domains, especially military policy and strategy. For the militaries across the globe who are yet to frame policies in regards to social media, the book by Aral remains essential reading that may help in the formulation of social media strategy for service personnel and to understand the inner workings of social media platforms. Although the book does not overtly discuss the relevance of social media in the military policy and strategy domains, nevertheless, certain lessons and insights can be drawn from the book to connect with military strategy and policy.

Aral’s seminal book provides two fundamental arguments: first, social media promised and still promises economic, political, and social uplift for people; it can also cause perils, such as external election influence, financial manipulation, privacy issues, spreading of fake news, and so forth. Thus, as Aral opines, “technologies (social media) hold potential for exceptional promise as well as tremendous perils - and neither the promise nor the peril is guaranteed.”[1] The author also argues that left unchecked, social media can bring disharmony and destruction to a country's economic, political, and social structures. Therefore, he opines that to fully utilise the potential of social media platforms and avoid their drawbacks, there needs to be a rigorous scientific understanding of social media and knowledge of its nuances to eradicate the unscientific hysteria around social media.

Aral illustrates the four levers that control social media: money, code, norms, and laws.

To achieve this promise, the author classifies the themes into four “levers” that are essential to the critical for the smooth functioning of social media: Money or the financial side wherein the business social media platforms are based on; the codes are the technical algorithms used by platforms to run their applications and also for measuring human behaviour and responses while using social media; norms are social factors that go into the functioning and responses of a society and finally the laws and regulations that framed by the political structures for the social media platforms to correct the discourse of social media platforms. These four domains are necessary to finally develop a scientific solution to find the right balance between the areas of contention such as privacy, free speech, and misinformation that emerge from social media.[2]

Themes

The book is a culmination of over 20 years of Aral’s research; it uses very well laid out chapters that cover information on how social media platforms work. However, he focuses on Facebook’s growth as it remains one of the biggest social media platforms globally.

In chapter 1, Aral tries to bring out the scale of information warfare on social media platforms starting from the misinformation campaign run by Russia during the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He showcases the complexity of the Russian cyber operation in Ukraine and across the world, spreading fake news, distorting the authentication of information, and the suppression of pro-Ukrainian voices on social media platforms. In chapter 2, he traces the fundamentals of fake news and scientific research on fake news. He brings out how fake news can lead to the sudden rise of stocks in the financial markets to the political weaponization of fake news, especially the reach; scope of Russian election interference in the American 2016 elections, and finally to the coronavirus misinformation and anti-vaccine campaigns run on social media platforms. He provides an interesting analogy on fake news: “lies spread online through a complex interaction of co-ordinated bots and unwitting humans working together in an unexpected symbiosis.”[3]

The author reintroduces the fundamental nature and promises of social media and showcases the perils brought along with it.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 deal with the basics of social media platforms. These chapters look into their structure and functioning. They also look into the neurological effects of social media platforms and address the basic concepts of social media networking. Chapters 6,7, 8, and 9 look into the societal impacts made by social media. These chapters look into the creation and the functioning of social media-based business models and their impact on the economy. The author examines how a crowd interacts with social media in chapter 10. He investigates the various social biases and influences that emerge out of social media which affects collective intelligence of the people interacting on social media platforms. He looks into what impacts crowd wisdom, such as diversity, independence, digital equality, polarisation, and other concepts. In chapter 11, the author reintroduces the fundamental nature and promises of social media and showcases the perils brought along with it. In the final chapter, Aral once again illustrates the four levers that control social media: money, code, norms, and laws. He also suggests a road map to address issues such as market competition, data protection, privacy, fake news, misinformation, and so forth.

The Two Misses

The book makes important inroads on the discussion of social media, yet are a few misses in it. Aral talks a lot about the effect of social media on human psychology. Yet, he somehow stalls on arguing how to stop the psychological and neurological effects of social media. Even as the argument that social media algorithms are designed to intrigue human minds and the author’s fundamental assertion to improve the social media landscape through money, code, norms, and laws does not somehow suggest meticulous means to tackle the effects of social media on the human psyche or the impact of social media on vulnerable minds of the people.

Secondly, the book does not make much headway on how terror outfits across the globe have been able to utilise social media platforms for their advantage. Apart from the theme on the “Redirect Method” adopted by social media platforms to counter radical posts ISIS, there is not much written about the authors' views to countering online radicalization through messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Telegram or ways through which identifying and stopping terror groups apart from ISIS and Al Qaeda in social media.[4] An interesting take on this is from the book Hacking ISIS by Malcolm Nance and Chris Sampson, which delves into how terror organizations such as ISIS utilize social media platforms to spread propaganda, carry out recruitment, and engage with sleeper cells across the world.[5]

Conclusion

Aral’s book remains a vital contribution to the literature on social media. The book is thoroughly researched, and as a reader, I enjoyed every part. As a novice in the cyber domain, the book was a welcome and comprehensive introduction to the topic. The book clearly showcases essential insights into the inner workings of social media and ensures that the concepts are presented well. The arguments laid out by Aral are compelling and well-argued. The roadmap proposed in the last chapter of the book is undoubtedly an important recommendation that needs more deliberation in the scientific community to address the challenges posed by social media and its effects on nations, markets, and, importantly, the human mind. The book is recommended for readers interested in the inner workings of social media platforms and those developing their interest in the cyber domain.

Thejus Gireesh currently works as a Young Professional at the Vivekananda International Foundation, New Delhi. He completed his B.A in political science from the University of Delhi. He previously worked as a Project Researcher at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, the Indian Army’s think tank. He is interested in cyber and maritime security issues.

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Header Image: Untitled, 2016, (Rami Al-zayat).

Notes:

[1] Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt, New York: Random House, 2020, 13.

[2] Aral, The Hype Machine, 61-62

[3] Aral, The Hype Machine, 42

[4] Aral, The Hype Machine, 270

[5] Malcolm Nance, Chris Sampson, and Ali H. Soufan, Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.