The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt
Sinan Aral
Top 10 Best Quotes
“we discovered what I still, to this day, consider some of the scariest scientific results I have ever encountered. We found that false news diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information—in some cases, by an order of magnitude. Whoever said “a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” was right. We had uncovered a reality-distortion machine in the pipes of social media platforms, through which falsehood traveled like lightning, while the truth dripped along like molasses.”
“repetition causes belief. If you beat us over the head with fake news, we’re more likely to believe it. It’s called the “illusory truth effect”—we tend to believe false information more after repeated exposure to it. People also tend to believe what they already think. (That’s confirmation bias.) So the more we hear something and the more it aligns with what we know, the more likely we are to believe it. Similar thinking has led some cognitive and political scientists to hypothesize that because of confirmation bias, corrective information can backfire—that trying to convince someone that their falsely held belief is wrong actually causes them to dig in to those false beliefs even more.”
“content. 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. They do this by injecting the influence of our peers into our daily decisions, mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends the New Social Age.”
“When subjects are randomly encouraged to mentalize, the mentalizing network is activated, but the networks for intelligence, reasoning, and working memory are not.”
“When fake news isn’t completely fabricated, it typically distorts real-world information by tweaking or contorting it, mixing it with true information, and highlighting its most sensational and emotional elements. It then scales rapidly on social media and spreads faster than our ability to verify or debunk it. Once it spreads, it’s hard to put back in the bottle and even harder to clean up, even with a healthy dose of the truth.”
“Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. —HANNAH ARENDT”
“The evidence for the social brain hypothesis implies that humans evolved to be social.”
“The Hype Machine has created a radical interdependence among us, shaping our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors.”
“Tectonic shifts are a regular occurrence for social media.”
“Social media is designed for our brains. It interfaces with the parts of the human brain that regulate our sense of belonging and social approval. It rewards our dopamine system and encourages us to seek more rewards by connecting, engaging, and sharing online.”
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Book Keywords:
influence, new-social-age, viral, hype-machine, post-truth-world, social-media, truth, fake-news, false-news, politics, effect-of-social-media, social-media-addiction
