In a wall painting in front of the University of Fine Arts in Cairo, text messaging and Facebook appear as symbols of freedom and revolution against the chains of autocracy. A new book suggests a more complicated picture of social media.

Social Studies

By Tom Scocca

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

The very first victim of the Facebook newsfeed—before the harassment of women in the video-game industry, before the death threats in Brazil, before the incitement of slaughter in Myanmar and Sri Lanka—was the Facebook newsfeed itself.

Facebook introduced (or imposed) the feature in 2006, the New York Times reporter Max Fisher writes in The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, turning its network of browsable profiles into a constantly updated listing, telling each user everything his or her friends had done on the site. Immediately, the updates that filled up the feed were about people joining groups with names such as “Against News Feed” and “I HATE FACEBOOK.”