Revealing Books about the Future of Social Media (Including Twitter)
The boom of technology and social media has spurred dramatic changes that have fractured cultural and political structures of society. But what is really going on behind closed doors of the Big Tech? With these list of books, we finally get accounts to demystify the enigma. In these thorough investigations, authors trace how seemingly harmless online activity gave rise to circumstances that propelled events like the GameStop situation and the January 6th insurrection. These activities reveal the secret methods BigTech has been using to manipulate its customers and just how expansive their unforeseen power is. But the future is not completely that bleak. These books will also outline ways we can tame the beast that BigTech has become, giving us hope for a better future and better relationship with social media.
We all know that social media is bad for our minds, but Max Fisher dives deeper to tell the gripping tale of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks preyed on people’s psychological frailties to create algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions—and increasingly extreme actions. He demonstrates that the companies’ founding principles, along with their focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world. Tracking the ubiquity of hate speech to violence, Fisher makes connections that first started in far-off locales to dark culminations in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. But this narrative is more than spotlighting villains. He also shows heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who revealed what was happening behind closed doors.
Ben Mezrich is back with a character-driven narrative that captures the incredibly public and darkly comic battle between one of the most influential men of our time—Elon Musk—and Twitter. This story will share perspectives from all sides, from insider accounts within Twitter headquarters to the mission-driven team Musk surrounded himself with.
Named as Best Book of the Year by New York Post, Ben Mezrich gives readers a beat-by-beat account of what went down with GameStop. It’s a story of how a loosely affiliate group of private investors and internet trolls on a subreddit, called WallStreetBets, took down one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street. At first, WallStreetBets was a joke, a place to share memes, shoot-the-moon investment tips, and laughs about big losses. Then they noticed an opportunity in GameStop, earning millions of dollars overnight. The Antisocial Network gives a fascinating glimpse on corporate drama, inflated personalities, and underestimated heroes and heroines who captivated the nation during one of the most volatile weeks in financial history.
In Spring 2021, Frances Haugen went public as the former employee of Facebook who blew the whistle on the company by copying tens of thousands of documents. She testified to Congress and spoke to the media to make sure everyone knew that Facebook not only set its algorithm to reward extremism, but that it also knew its customers used the platform to spread falsehoods and instigate violence. Coming out in Summer 2023, this is the story of a woman who went against the grain to bring to light the culture and practices of Facebook for the first time.
For four years, Journalist Allum Bokhari investigated the tech giants that dominated the internet: Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. He discovered a shocking plot to seize control of information flow and utilize that power to its full extent. His network of whistleblowers explain how these tech giants see themselves as “good censors”—controlling the information we receive to “protect” us from “dangerous” speech. The investigation reveals methods to secretly manipulate online information building toward its use to stop Donald Trump’s re-election.
As more of our society, culture, and politics become integrated within a hyper-networked fabric, David Auerbach explains how the interactions of so many people within these large online networks have created a new beast—ever-changing systems that operate beyond the control of the individuals and organizations that created them. Coming in Spring 2023, Auerbach shows that even though we ultimately cannot control these meganets, we can tame them through counterintuitive measures he’ll outline in this book.
Emily Hoang is a writer and editor, who is obsessed with haunted houses, ghosts, and dreams. More info can be found on her website.