From a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, "an essential book for our times" (Ezra Klein), tracking the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech's breakneck race to drive engagement--and profits--at all costs fractured the world

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ills that first festered in far-off locales of the world to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection, all as the social-media giants refused to intervene.

But his narrative is about more than the villains. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it's too late.