NYT Notable Books 2019: 26/100

This was a challenging read days out from the US election. Marantz talks a lot about the connections between the rise of online extremism and the rise of Trump. And the book is five years old, so it doesn't cover things like the creation of Truth Social, or Musk's purchase of Twitter in the name of "free speech." This book is hard to read because I also don't really care to humanize people like the people Marantz talks about. It's well-written, but knowing what I know now, and seeing where we are one day before the US election, I just don't care to give space to people like this, even if it's in the same of research and trying to make sense of how we got to where we are. 

Nothing I've read in the book was seriously surprising in that I didn't expect it, but to see it all laid out, with descriptions from the perpetrators themselves, really puts into perspective the severity of lack of censure within internet communities. 
There were quite a few times where I had to take a break from reading because of the amount of cynicism this caused me to feel about the general state of the world. Though it does call into question the role of techno business capitalists in this spread of viral hate, but reflecting on the past two years since "Antisocial" was published, especially after the events of January 6th, 2021 there doesn't seem to be lasting effects in how the world treats issues of this magnitude, only treating symptoms and not causes. 

This is less of a review than a general inquiry, and I'd especially appreciate a discussion on this from other community members who are interested in this topic, but does this phenomena arise the need for policy reform especially as we continue to discuss political and social affairs on social media? This book is a very America-centric viewpoint and fails to account for the different cultures things like Facebook and Twitter affects. There are policy restriction on communication that are already enacted throughout the world that promotes political censorship of minorities under authoritarian rule. How might we account from how social media affects different countries? 

Might be be useful to break up these companies to small subcategories? But that might also promote the censorship of citizens in a way that prevents them from enacting meaningful, positive political change. It's a much broader topic than just the removal of Nazi's (which should happen, of course). But if we have to beg these companies to remove these voices of racism and violence, can we really trust them in leading discussions that affect us culturally and politically?