Sinan Aral

"Social media connected the world--and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. Now a leading researcher at MIT draws on 20 years of research to show how these trends threaten our political, economic, and emotional health in this eye-opening exploration of the dark side of technological progress. Today we have the ability, unprecedented in human history, to amplify our interactions with each other through social media. It is paramount, MIT social media expert Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsized impact social media has on our culture, our democracy, and our lives in order to steer today's social technology toward good, while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Otherwise, we could fall victim to what Aral calls "The Hype Machine." As a senior researcher of the longest-running study of fake news ever conducted, Aral found that lies spread online farther and faster than the truth--a harrowing conclusion that was featured on the cover of Science magazine. Among the questions Aral explores following twenty years of field research: Did Russian interference change the 2016 election? And how is it affecting the vote in 2020? Why does fake news travel faster than the truth online? How do social ratings and automated sharing determine which products succeed and fail? How does social media affect our kids? First, Aral links alarming data and statistics to three accelerating social media shifts: hyper-socialization, personalized mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends. Next, he grapples with the consequences of the Hype Machine for elections, businesses, dating, and health. Finally, he maps out strategies for navigating the Hype Machine, offering his singular guidance for managing social media to fulfill its promise going forward. Rarely has a book so directly wrestled with the secret forces that drive the news cycle every day"--

How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt

The Hype Machine

In this brilliant smart-thinking book about the power and influence of social media, Professor Sinan Aral shows how 'hyper-socialization' has profoundly changed us. Why does fake news spread faster than the truth? Do products and ideas become popular because they are good or because they are rated highly online? How does influence actually work and what does it mean to be influential? Which strategies and tactics can help businesses survive and thrive in the New Social Age? Human beings have always been a social species. We've been communicating and cooperating with one another since the dawn of time. But today, something is different. Over the last decade, we've doused the fire of human interaction with high octane gasoline. We've created technologies that massively amplify the ways in which we interact with one another, automated by machine intelligence that is designed to inform, stimulate and entertain us. Together these technologies constitute what Sinan Aral calls the 'Hype Machine'. Digital platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are injecting the influence of peers into our daily decisions, driving the products we buy, how we vote and even who we love. Packed with original research conducted by Aral and his team, The Hype Machine describes the impact of social media on statecraft, politics, voting, business and public health, and shows us how to adapt our society to the hyper-socialized state the Hype Machine has wrought. This is a fascinating book that provides counterintuitive and surprising answers to some of the most hotly debated topics of our connected, digital era, as it impacts society.

The Hype Machine: the Madness of Crowds in the New Social Age

In this brilliant smart-thinking book about the power and influence of social media, Professor Sinan Aral shows how ‘hyper-socialization’ has profoundly changed us.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and Our Health – and How We Must Adapt

Professors Iyengar, Van den Bulte and Valente (2010) (hereafter IVV) make deep nuanced contributions to our understanding of how opinion leadership and social contagion affect the adoption and diffusion of new products. Their work moves us forward not only by answering several fundamental questions at the heart of diffusion research, but also by highlighting important open questions that should form the basis of future inquiry. In this comment, I extend insights gleaned from their empirical analyses to suggest how they may lead to an even more comprehensive understanding of peer influence and social contagion. Their work and the work that lies ahead are not only critical to marketing science and practice, but also more broadly to a host of disciplines as diverse as epidemiology, innovation management, organizational performance, development economics and public health. In what follows I sketch five broad questions suggested by IVV's findings that could, if appropriately addressed, dramatically improve how we conceptualize and manage social contagions in a variety of domains.

A Comment on Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion

Identifying Social Influence

Dylan Walker

We examine how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is generally considered to be more effective at promoting product contagion when it is personalized and active. Unfortunately, the relative effectiveness of different viral features has not been quantified, nor has their effectiveness been definitively established, largely because of difficulties surrounding econometric identification of endogenous peer effects. We therefore designed a randomized field experiment on a popular social networking website to test the effectiveness of a range of viral messaging capabilities in creating peer influence and social contagion among the 1.4 million friends of 9,687 experimental users. Overall, we find that viral product design features can indeed generate econometrically identifiable peer influence and social contagion effects. More surprisingly, we find that passive-broadcast viral messaging generates a 246% increase in local peer influence and social contagion effects, while adding active-personalized viral messaging only generates an additional 98% increase in contagion. Although active-personalized messaging is more effective in encouraging adoption per message and is correlated with more user engagement and sustained product use, passive-broadcast messaging is used more often enough to eclipse those benefits, generating more total peer adoption in the network. In addition to estimating the effects of viral product design on social contagion and product diffusion, our work also provides a model for how randomized trials can be used to identify peer influence effects in networks.

Sinan Aral

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