MixedLos Angeles Review of Books\"Readers can easily grok his readable, punchy prose. They get it: Facebook is bad. But this simplicity also comes with important tradeoffs — it’s not so appealing to those readers who prefer nuance over rhetorical force, and it alienates academic audiences and others suspicious of monocausal explanations. Vaidhyanathan’s approach has two main problems. The first is that Antisocial Media presents an overly narrow account of today’s platform economy, one that reduces the potential harms of contemporary digital technologies to a single actor. The book would be better if it paid more attention to the role of exogenous factors in Facebook’s rise to market dominance ... The second, related issue, is that Vaidhyanathan tends to be one-sided in how he presents evidence to support his argument. Readers are given the impression that the case against Facebook is closed, when in fact major debates around digital media and democracy are nowhere near settled ... It’s an admittedly high bar, but the fact is that the arguments made in books like Antisocial Media matter more than ever ... Antisocial Media concludes with only a few policy recommendations, perhaps because Vaidhyanathan has succumbed to the fatalistic diagnosis of the preceding pages.\
