The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

By Max Fisher

Little, Brown/2022

Reviewed by Charlie Angus

February 4, 2023

Last week, I was driving into Toronto on the 401 and I saw a bunch of people standing on an overpass trying to get the attention of drivers. It was bitterly cold. People were driving at 100 kms an hour and yet the group above us were waving handwritten signs warning us about the danger of needles, vaccines and the nefarious power of the World Economic Forum.

If this had occurred a few years ago, I would have shaken my head at the silliness of it all, but the fact is, it ain’t funny anymore. Fringe medical dissent has become a potent political force and what we have also learned is that misinformation kills.

According to a new study by the Council of Canadian Academies, vaccine misinformation was responsible for the unnecessary deaths of an estimated 2,800 people during the COVID pandemic. These were people who had been led to believe that either COVID was a hoax or that the vaccine was a nefarious plot. And 2,800 people who fell for this ended up dying. That’s roughly 1,000 more than the annual automobile deaths from one end of the country to the other.

The report pegged the cost of vaccine disinformation at 198,000 extra cases of COVID, 13,000 more people sent to hospital, and a $300 million hit to a medical system. This represents a staggering toll of lost life and drained resources in the midst of the biggest health crisis in a century.

The people who died weren’t weirdo extremists. They were ordinary people – your cousin, my neighbour, a trusted teacher. And yet they became convinced that a medical effort to stop a deadly new virus was a greater threat than the virus itself.

I have spent a lot of time over the last number of years attempting to make sense of the rise of conspiracy theories and the radicalization of otherwise very normal people. But nothing prepared me for the chill I felt in reading the book The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by New York Times correspondent Max Fisher. Fisher tracks the rise of violence and political instability in locations all over the globe to the exploitive propaganda algorithms of Facebook and YouTube.

Fisher doesn’t make bold assertions. He takes the reader to ground zero to meet with the researchers who tracked the connections between online disinformation and real-world harms. He interviews those who tried to warn Facebook that their platform was becoming a staging ground for genocidal violence in both Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Facebook blew them off. In Germany, he met researchers who provided very clear links between online radicalization and the rise of violence against refugees.

The patterns of how seemingly irrational fringe online chat morphs into political uprising (such as the convoy blockade) become very clear when reading Fisher’s work.

The fact is that both Facebook and YouTube’s machine-driven AI is programmed to keep people glued to their screens as long as possible, and propaganda — especially emotionally manipulative propaganda — thrives on a captive audience.

What is most concerning is that pathways to extremism often come from very marginal or seemingly un-political interests. Take anti-vaccine suspicion. Fisher writes about Renée Diresta, now the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. As a Silicon Valley investor and young mom, Diresta attempted to get her head around the fact that even though only a small percentage of the California population held anti-vaccine views, they had an inordinate impact on the rising resistance of parents to get their children vaccinated. Diresta went on Facebook to join discussion groups and soon found that the algorithm was sending her all manner of suggestions to join Mom groups, health discussions and vaccine information sites. All of these pages promoted conspiracy and disinformation. But then she noticed something more concerning: the algorithms began to feed her more and more politically extreme content.

Fisher writes about a similar occurrence that was happening at the same time in Brazil as the YouTube algorithm spread viral content warning young mothers that the deadly Zika virus was caused by vaccines. As more and more mothers began to question the science of vaccines, it began to have real-time impacts on the health and lives of children. And then the algorithms led people to much more conspiratorial explanations – the illness was the responsibility of feminists trying to promote abortion. Or their child’s death was the result was a plot by George Soros. Or it was driven by lying doctors. This is when the death threats against Brazil’s front-line medical workers began.

During this time, Jair Bolsonaro, a military officer turned career politician with a record of fraud, corruption and radical right-wing views, was using the YouTube algorithms to build a huge base of supporters. He shocked the country when he won election in what was called the “YouTube presidency.”

So, how can an algorithm generate conspiracy theories, falsehood and even hate? The fact is that both Facebook and YouTube’s machine-driven AI is programmed to keep people glued to their screens as long as possible, and propaganda — especially emotionally manipulative propaganda — thrives on a captive audience. A mother who believes vaccines are safe is not likely to spend much time in a group chat. After all, what is there to talk about? However, someone who is told that their child is being experimented on by mysterious and dark forces will want to know more and might become more willing to believe that there is a conspiracy that must be fought. Both YouTube and Facebook’s powerful machine AI algorithms are there to provide an endless run of videos and content to keep people hooked and manipulated.

Diresta thought Silicon Valley would want to see her meticulous research on how the algorithm was distorting truth in favour of conspiracy theories. But she soon found out that companies like Facebook were making too much money from the huge amount of time people were spending on the platform. Extremist content played a big part in keeping them hooked. And, as whistleblowers — from Canadian Chris Wylie on Facebook’s role in manipulating and misrepresenting UK public sentiment on Brexit to Frances Haugen on the platform’s harming of teenagers — have attested, misinformation, manipulation and propaganda are built into the business model.

When the pandemic hit, the world faced the perfect storm of disinformation, isolation and online radicalization. Within a month of the pandemic, online disinformation had vastly overtaken any medical or official information. Along with this rise in disinformation came a proliferation of anti-government and far-right extremism. If you popped the query “Alternate health” into the Facebook search function it led almost immediately to suggestions to join Q Anon and anti-government groups that were becoming increasingly militarized.

A YouTube video titled “The Big Lie” which claimed that Democrats stole the 2020 election was viewed 138 million times. Compare this with the mere 7.5 million who actually watched professional news coverage of the election.

As a legislator, I have worked with politicians from various countries in attempting to force Silicon Valley to take greater responsibility for the proliferation of hate, disinformation and real-world harms that has resulted from the commodification of lies that makes propaganda profitable. But these companies are enormously powerful. They have paid massive fines for privacy violations but have shown little willingness to tinker with their so-called “secret sauce” in how the machine driven AI keeps people locked on their screens and consuming nonsense. In the end, I believe the only thing that will force change is liability legislation that will hold these companies responsible for the violence and political extremism promoted by their platforms.

As for the health of democracy in a world being flooded by disinformation? This is a much more concerning issue.

But if you read one book this year, read Chaos Machine. Every word of truth helps.

Charlie Angus has been the NDP Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay since 2004. He is also frontman for the Grievous Angels, and a regular Policy contributor. His latest book is Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower.