The debut of a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist: a gripping narrative that fuses research, exclusive interviews, and on-the-ground reporting to capture the full inside story of Big Tech's monomaniacal race to drive engagementand profitsat all costs.We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for us, for our children, and for our democracies. But what exactly is it about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms that causes the kind of upheaval we see spilling out into real-world violence? Max Fisher, using years of his own international reporting for the New York Times, tells the inside story of how the social networks wrecked the world: the foundational tenets of their ideology, their race to maximize engagement, and the resulting algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, ultimately, extreme behavior.Taking the reader from deep inside Silicon Valley to the far reaches of Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Germany, and Brazi
