Originally published: 2018.

Introduction: the problem with Facebook is Facebook
The pleasure machine
The surveillance machine
The attention machine
The benevolence machine
The protest machine
The politics machine
The disinformation machine
The nonsense machine
Conclusion

If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energise hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this book, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging