Over the past 15 years, Facebook has transformed from a Harvard-exclusive social networking site into a 2.2 billion–member global behemoth. Hardly a week passes without Facebook appearing in the news for one misstep after another. From providing backdoor data access to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to spreading false and manipulative political ads, Facebook has become the poster child for digital technology’s destructive tendencies. By following their early motto—“Move fast and break things”—the company has, it seems, not only disrupted the technology and advertising industries; it has broken democracy itself.

So how do we solve a problem like Facebook? In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan takes on this question by examining the sources of Facebook’s destructive capacities as well as potential solutions for the problems it has invited. A timely and engaging book that synthesizes “primary testimony and secondary documents of the moment” (p. 27), it explores the consequences of Facebook’s dominance in our social and political lives. This is no small undertaking; as Vaidhyanathan notes, Facebook seeks to become “the operating system of all of our lives” (p. 30). The depth and reach of the platform makes it impossible to escape (even if you do not have a Facebook profile, for example, the company tracks you through your friends and family), while the opacity with which the company operates means it is difficult to ever grasp the full extent of its influence. Yet with its clear and engaging examples and attentiveness to history and context, Antisocial Media does an excellent job of unpacking the multiple intersecting—and compounding—ways that Facebook shapes our behavior.

There are seven chapters, each of which takes up one dimension of Facebook’s multifaceted operation, from “Pleasure Machine” (Chap. 1) to “Surveillance Machine” (Chap. 2) to “Protest Machine” (Chap. 5) and “Disinformation Machine” (Chap. 7). The result is, according to Vaidhyanathan, a platform that incentivizes the spread of “false or misleading information” by amplifying “content that hits strong emotional registers” (p. 5) and rewarding “common habits that push us to convene with those who think like we do” (p. 7). The very design of the platform, he argues, works to focus our attention on the things we like and the people who are similar to us. This individualism, combined with the virality of “highly charged content” (p. 9), means that while Facebook might be quite good at mobilizing citizens, “it is terrible for deliberation” (p. 7) because it undermines “our ability to think through problems together” (p. 211).

Vaidhyanathan is not the first to claim that Facebook is detrimental to democratic politics. Nevertheless, Antisocial Media makes important contributions to the study of Facebook and other digital technologies. For one, it does an excellent job of placing Facebook in its social, economic, and historical context. Often, studies of Facebook and other social media seek to isolate the effects of the technology in question. Yet, as Vaidhyanathan rightly argues throughout this book, Facebook is inherently symbiotic; it cannot function without the people who use it. “Basically,” says Vaidhyanathan, “there are two things wrong with Facebook: how it works and how people use it” (p. 10). This is one of the book’s most insightful observations, and one that should resonate with those interested in studying the political effects of digital technologies: “[W]e misunderstand the effects of technologies when we pretend that they operate or exist outside of human bodies and human relations . . . [W]e shape these technologies as much as—if not more than—they shape us” (p. 101). When it comes to undermining democracy, we are as much the problem as Facebook is.

Another contribution of the book is its explicitly global perspective. Early in the text, Vaidhyanathan explains his decision to take “a global and multinational view” (p. 27) of Facebook, and it is a welcome one. Throughout, Vaidhyanathan compares examples from around the globe to more fully explicate Facebook’s design and its effects on the people who use it. In his discussion of the company’s mastery of the “attention economy” (Chap. 3), for instance, he uses the example of the Chinese social media application WeChat to better highlight Facebook’s current limitations and illustrate its aspirations for the future. Similar comparisons—between Facebook’s attempts to impose Free Basics Internet service in India (Chap. 4) and the Philippines (Chap. 7), as well as between Facebook’s use in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Chap. 6) and its work with the Bharatiya Janata Party in India and President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines (Chap. 7)—serve to emphasize Facebook’s power and reach, as well as its effects, in ways that more parochial examples would not. After all, as the author writes, “Facebook has universalizing tendencies and embodies a globalist ambition. But it does not work the same way in Phnom Penh as it does in Philadelphia” (p. 27). This attentiveness to the complexities of studying a global digital platform that is inherently tied to, and reflective of, local social norms and customs makes this book stand out as an exemplar of how to study digital technologies.

Although Antisocial Media provides readers with an exceptional discussion of the historical context and structural details of Facebook’s operations, it falters, however, in its political analysis—specifically regarding Facebook’s relationship to democracy. Positing a distinction between “motivation” and “deliberation” (though arguing that both are necessary for democracy), Vaidhyanathan argues that the reasons why Facebook is good at the former make it “terrible” for the latter. Yet the model of deliberation that he seems to use to ground his analysis often appears as a somewhat nostalgic picture of a single, cohesive public, with a “common set of facts” (p. 14) and “sense of collective national fate” (p. 199). It is one in which citizens “subscribe to rules of intellectual engagement” (p. 14) that demand “full and calm consideration,” and where there are “responsible and reputable news sources” (p. 8) that “we depend on to foster democratic deliberation and accountability” (p. 178). Certainly, this is a not-uncommon model of deliberative democracy—a national public sphere, governed by the norms of rational speech, and led by experts. But it is one that has been repeatedly challenged by scholars within the literature on deliberative democracy (e.g., Iris Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory, 29(5), 2001; Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere, 1990). Democracy, as it is practiced, is often much messier than it appears in Vaidhyanathan’s telling.

This is not to say that the author’s main claim—that “Facebook undermines our ability to think collectively about our problems” (p. 10)—is wrong. But it might complicate his argument. Who, for example, does he mean when he talks about “our problems” and how, exactly, does he expect us to “think collectively” about them? These are questions that go unanswered in the book—but they are also questions raised by the widespread use of Facebook. The company has certainly disrupted the practices of mainstream journalistic outlets like the New York Times, for example. But in so doing, it has also created spaces for previously marginalized or silenced voices and narratives to gain more widespread attention. If we take this messier reality of democratic politics as our starting point, in other words, maybe Facebook has not created “alternative cultural and political universes for us” (p. 89), as Vaidhyanathan claims, but has instead revealed divisions and disagreements that have always existed but have not been widely acknowledged until now. Like all technologies, Facebook resists simple classification; in exploring its effects on democratic politics, then, the author might have discussed these tensions in more detail.

Of course, as Vaidhyanathan rightly argues, Facebook’s advertising model and its unprecedented data-collection methods—both of which are unregulated by governments and opaque to users—are cause for serious concern. But his call to reinvest in traditional “civil society organizations” and to “put Facebook in its proper place, perhaps merely as a source of social and familial contact” (p. 17) again invokes a sanitized vision of democratic politics—one that separates “proper” political activity from the messier realities of our daily lived experiences. And upholding this separation causes us to overlook potentially productive alternatives. Facebook, as Vaidhyanathan notes, “fulfills needs and desires” (p. 17). And these needs and desires, given the site’s popularity, are clearly quite powerful. As such, Facebook’s global dominance invites scholars not just to consider how to contain it but also to think about how we might harness those needs and desires for more democratic ends—and make Facebook work for democracy.