Thread by @sinanaral

[🚨New Book🚨] Today is the BIG DAY! With the help of so many amazing people, I'm SO excited to launch my first book, THE HYPE MACHINE, today!

sinanaral.io/books

For those of you who like to sample before you buy, here is a sneak peak at the book in 12 acts 1/

[Chapter 1] opens with the annexation of Crimea as a leading example of the geopolitical impact of the New Social Age. It provides new evidence on the role of social media in the Crimean annexation - the first forceful redrawing of European borders since WWII. 2/

[Chapter 2] traces the Rise of Fake News all the way to the End of Reality, covering its impact on elections & democracy, business & markets and our public health like #Covid_19. It covers the science of fake news and the implications of the rise cheap, ubiquitous #deepfakes 3/

[Chapter 3] goes under the hood of the Hype Machine, from the Technology Trifecta that created it, to the Hype Loop process (the dynamic interplay of human agency and machine intelligence) that runs it to the Four Levers that control it: Money, Code, Norms and Laws. 4/

[Chapter 4] describes the neuroscience of what happens to our brains when we use social media, how our brains evolved to process the Hype Machine's social signals, how social media was designed for our brains & the neural foundations of how social media changes our behavior. 5/

[Chapter 5] details the economics of social media and how a little known economics paper from 1974 laid out the go-to-market strategy @Facebook used to defeat #MySpace (Hint: Its not just network effects, but a specific type of network effects that matter). 6/

[Chapter 6] describes how social media scales mass persuasion, enabling anyone, from Russian agents to small business owners to steer our opinions, beliefs, perceptions and behaviors and the importance of causality in assessing the Hype Machine's impact on our world. 7/

[Chapter 7] details how the Hype Machine hypersocializes our society, injecting the influence of our peers into everything we do, from exercise, to news, to dating, to charitable giving and even to our emotions, documenting the vast interdependence social media creates. 8/

[Chapter 8] describes five essential strategies businesses, policymakers and influencers must use to adapt to a hypersocialized world and create change and innovation in the New Social Age. 9/

[Chapter 9] describes the attention economy the Hype Machine runs on. It assesses whether Cambridge Analytica's microtargeting was real or snake oil and the implications of algorithmic amplification in creating a "tyranny of trends." 10/

[Chapter 10] describes how the Hype Machine overturns the Wisdom of Crowds, creating a Madness of Crowds instead. It discusses the science behind "filter bubbles" & "echo chambers," the Hype Machine's role in pulling us apart & how we can regain crowd wisdom. 11/

[Chapter 11] reminds us of the promise of social media to create social & economic opportunity, powerful (yet fragile) social movements, (unequal) economic opportunity & how the source of its promise is also the source of its peril, making it hard to regulate. 12/

[Chapter 12] describes how we must adapt to the New Social Age, providing detailed solutions for Privacy and Data Protection, Antitrust, Competition, Data Portability, Fake News, Free Speech vs Hate Speech, Election Integrity and much much more... 13/

[Fin] I'm excited to collaborate with the diligent technologists, activists, journalists, scientists, policymakers, & citizens working to improve the New Social Age & to move this conversation forward from the Hype Machine's peril to its promise. I hope this book helps! 14/