Antisocial Media How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

A fully updated paperback edition that includes coverage of the key developments of the past two years, including the political controversies that swirled around Facebook with increasing intensity in the Trump era.

If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this fully updated paperback edition of Antisocial Media, including a new chapter on the increasing recognition of--and reaction against--Facebook's power in the last couple of years, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it's an indictment of how "social media" has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump's election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He produces a local public-affairs television program and several podcasts, and he directs the publication of Virginia Quarterly Review. A former professional journalist, he has published five previous books on technology, law, and society, including The Googlization of Everything. He has also contributed to publications such as The Nation, Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, BookForum, The New York Times Book Review, and The Baffler.

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Pleasure Machine
Chapter 2: The Surveillance Machine
Chapter 3: The Attention Machine
Chapter 4: The Benevolence Machine
Chapter 5: The Protest Machine
Chapter 6: The Politics Machine
Chapter 7: The Disinformation Machine
Conclusion: The Nonsense Machine
Acknowledgements