The Hype Machine Quotes

“When subjects are randomly encouraged to mentalize, the mentalizing network is activated, but the networks for intelligence, reasoning, and working memory are not.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“Tectonic shifts are a regular occurrence for social media.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“My goal is to take you on a roller-coaster journey through what I’ve learned studying, building, investing in, and working with social media over the last twenty years. It’s a harrowing journey with unbelievable discoveries and sordid scandals about how social media impacts our democracy; how it can disseminate lies while connecting us to valuable truths; how it fights repression at times while promoting it at others; how it propagates hate speech while defending free speech; and, most of all, how all this works, under the hood, to hook us neurologically, emotionally, socially, and economically. The”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“The evidence for the social brain hypothesis implies that humans evolved to be social.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“repetition causes belief. If you beat us over the head with fake news, we’re more likely to believe it. It’s called the “illusory truth effect”—we tend to believe false information more after repeated exposure to it. People also tend to believe what they already think. (That’s confirmation bias.) So the more we hear something and the more it aligns with what we know, the more likely we are to believe it. Similar thinking has led some cognitive and political scientists to hypothesize that because of confirmation bias, corrective information can backfire—that trying to convince someone that their falsely held belief is wrong actually causes them to dig in to those false beliefs even more.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“False political news traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false news. It reached more than 20,000 people nearly three times faster than all other types of false news reached just 10,000 people. News about politics and urban legends spread the fastest and was the most viral. Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, even when controlling for the age of the account holder, activity level, and number of followers and followees of the original tweeter and whether the original tweeter was a verified user.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. —HANNAH ARENDT”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“we discovered what I still, to this day, consider some of the scariest scientific results I have ever encountered. We found that false news diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information—in some cases, by an order of magnitude. Whoever said “a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” was right. We had uncovered a reality-distortion machine in the pipes of social media platforms, through which falsehood traveled like lightning, while the truth dripped along like molasses.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“By looking under the hood at how the Hype Machine operates and employing science to decipher its impact, we can collectively steer this ship away from the impending rocks and into calmer waters.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“The Hype Machine has created a radical interdependence among us, shaping our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How WeMust Adapt

“Social media is designed for our brains. It interfaces with the parts of the human brain that regulate our sense of belonging and social approval. It rewards our dopamine system and encourages us to seek more rewards by connecting, engaging, and sharing online.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt

“When fake news isn’t completely fabricated, it typically distorts real-world information by tweaking or contorting it, mixing it with true information, and highlighting its most sensational and emotional elements. It then scales rapidly on social media and spreads faster than our ability to verify or debunk it. Once it spreads, it’s hard to put back in the bottle and even harder to clean up, even with a healthy dose of the truth.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt

“In the Hype Machine, everyone is a digital marketer, whether we’re fighting for ideas or for consumer dollars.”
― Sinan Aral , The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt

“content. But at the same time, these signals are much more transformative—they are hypersocializing our society, scaling mass persuasion, and creating a tyranny of trends. They do this by injecting the influence of our peers into our daily decisions, mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends the New Social Age.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--and How We Must Adapt

“During our research, we discovered what I still, to this day, consider some of the scariest scientific results I have ever encountered. We found that false news diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information—in some cases, by an order of magnitude. Whoever said “a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” was right. We had uncovered a reality-distortion machine in the pipes of social media platforms, through which falsehood traveled like lightning, while the truth dripped along like molasses.”
― Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and Our Health – and How We Must Adapt