[A] full and rigorous accounting of Facebook’s sins. Much of the criticism will be familiar to anyone who has been following the news about the company. What distinguishes the book is Vaidhyanathan’s skill in putting the social media phenomenon into a broader context — legal, historical and political ... Vaidhyanathan’s criticism is sharp but even-handed. He debunks some of the more extreme claims about the influence of social media on public opinion ... Antisocial Media is not a hopeful book... [and] scholarly in tone.

[An] excellent critique ... a clear analysis of the social harm that [Facebook] is fostering. For this we need good, informed critiques such as this book. Given Facebook’s dominance, it will be a long haul [to political will], but then, as the Chinese say, the longest journey begins with a single step. Professor Vaidhyanathan has just taken it.

[A] structured response to the behemoth that is Facebook ... [Vaidhyanathan's] fantastic style using heavy-sounding chapters are permeated by the light touches of how fun it is to use Facebook... The result is an analytically satisfying work that’s aware of how real people use the popular platform.

[Antisocial Media is] compelling and couldn’t be more timely ... the most fascinating parts of this book had to do with the ways Facebook has worked with political campaigns and the ways right wing movements deployed Facebook among other social networks to promote fringe agendas ... Vaidhyanathan points to some hopeful signs.

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.