This interdependence is enabled by digital networks, like Facebook and Twitter, and guided by machine intelligence, like newsfeed and friend-suggestion algorithms. The Hype Machine has created a radical interdependence among us, shaping our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. By answering them, we can better understand how the Hype Machine impacts our world. presidential election? When joggers in Venice, Italy, post their runs to social media, do joggers in Venice, California, run faster? These questions contemplate the disruptive power of social media. Why does fake news spread so much faster than the truth online? How did one false tweet wipe out $140 billion in stock market value in minutes? How did Facebook change the 2012 presidential election by tweaking one algorithm? Did Russian social media manipulation flip the 2016 U.S.

Today, as more and more new social technologies come online, we know less and less about how they are changing us. Fifteen short years ago, all we had to facilitate our digital connections was the phone, the fax machine, and email. The striking thing about the New Social Age is that fifteen years ago this cacophony of digital social signals didn’t even exist. In 2013, a false tweet briefly wiped out almost $140 billion in U.S. I call this trifecta of hypersocialization, personalized mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends the New Social Age. They do this by injecting the influence of our peers into our daily decisions, curating population-scale behavior change, and enforcing an attention economy. But at the same time, these signals are much more transformative - they are hypersocializing our society, scaling mass persuasion, and creating a tyranny of trends. These signals are delivered to our always-on mobile devices through platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, and they are routed through the human social network by algorithms designed to optimize our connections, accelerate our interactions, and maximize our engagement with tailored streams of content. +++Įvery minute of every day, our planet now pulses with trillions of digital social signals, bombarding us with streams of status updates, news stories, tweets, pokes, posts, referrals, advertisements, notifications, shares, check-ins, and ratings from peers in our social networks, news media, advertisers, and the crowd. This includes understanding the forces at play and the science behind the Hype Machine, and what social media companies, policymakers, and users need to do to achieve the promise and avoid the peril of this new social order. In his new book “ The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health - And How We Must Adapt ,” excerpted below, Aral, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, lays out the path to achieve the promise of social media. Social media holds potential for both promise and peril and we’re at the crossroads. And with a presidential election approaching, campaigns reached voters through the Hype Machine amid concerns about how foreign actors use the networks to sway election results. Some businesses used social media to connect with customers quarantined at home others joined a boycott of Facebook to protest the way the company handles hate speech.

2020 has brought highs and lows for the communication ecosystem created by social media - what MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral calls the “Hype Machine.” People used digital social networks to stay connected with friends and loved ones during a pandemic, while at the same time misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 spread through the same websites.

Hype machine meme