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.

The Hype Machine is a fascinating, accessible and eminently readable rumination on our addiction to social media, it's causes and the pros and cons of said obsession. It digs deep into the way social media can be used for innocent purposes but also nefarious ones and the consequences of both. Most people have accounts on social media sites and I would recommend this book to all of those individuals as it certainly helped me gain a better understanding of exactly how much influence the things we read on there have on our decisions, opinions and lifestyles. There is no doubt this relatively new technology is a double-edged sword; it can certainly enrich lives but on the other hand it can become a habit that is difficult to break free from. This is undoubtedly a really important and timely book and one that engages with interesting research and intriguing anecdotes. Highly recommended.

An interesting read that I'm glad to have discovered. I'll definitely be seeking out more by this author.

This was one of the most interesting books I've read on social media, which must be down to the personal research the author had done, rather than just using other sources. Some claims the book made felt like a bit of a reach, but when backed up by evidence was sobering.

Aral's "The Hype Machine" is an absolute page-turner and that is mainly because of his writing style; the book provides some interesting observations and a holistic view of how social media works and marketing works.

The Hype Machine is a book about social media—about its power and influence, and about what might need to be done to lessen its negative effects. Sinan Aral defines 'the Hype Machine' as the digital social media technologies that have particularly taken off over the last decade or two and considers how they do what they do, helping us to interact, engage, live our lives, and do a whole load more, but also how they impact our decisions, elections, and lives. Aral then goes on to lay out proposals for what could be done to regulate these technologies in ways which might have concrete impact.

As someone who reads a fair few books about popular technology and social media, what made The Hype Machine distinctive (other than the insistence on calling social media 'the Hype Machine' throughout the book) was the amount of research cited and used throughout. Whether done by Aral and his team or by others, the book provides a lot of references to research and studies on the actual impact of social media and how it works in different ways, from our brains to network effects. This makes it a good choice if you're looking for a book on these technologies which balances accessibility with linking to academic studies. It is also notably up to date, with a prologue specifically discussing COVID-19 and references throughout to social media in 2020, which in some ways can blur the lines in debates around privacy and digital technologies through pandemic measures and tech companies' involvement in these.

This is also a useful look at the two directions social media is being pulled in: towards greater openness, but also greater privacy and security. Aral outlines some of the issues and debates around these, making it a useful introduction for people new to some of these ideas, as well as proposing ways of managing the two areas. The later part of the book focuses on the future and on what should be done in terms of regulation and people's behaviour, which is useful for starting discussion though (probably naturally) I had some questions about some parts (and as the focus of the book is on the US, the regulation was mostly focused on there).

The Hype Machine is a handy book for my work personally, and an interesting read for anyone who wants to think about how social media works and the effects it has been having over recent years. For my tastes, it lets the tech companies off a bit too much and occasionally falls into thinking that technology can always solve technology's problems, but Aral often gives multiple sides to a debate and makes it obvious that things often aren't clear cut.