"Social media is not fundamentally a source of information or a competition of ideas, but a competition of identities."
With that and other provocative findings, Dr. Chris Bail, Director of the Duke University Polarization Lab and author of Breaking the Social Media Prism (Princeton U. Press) challenges what we know about social media – its uses and abuses. Dr. Bail and his colleagues delineate the strong incentives to create online alter-egos, especially more extreme ones, that command so much more attention.
Social and political identity is dangerously challenging to shift. And Dr. Bail’s experiments underscore this point. His team exposed hundreds of Democrats and Republicans to media feeds from the other point of view – but with completely unexpected results. Virtually no one became more moderate from this exposure and many participants, especially Republicans, doubled down on their identity.
Bail’s broader point is how social media amplifies extremism and mutes moderation. His team has built tools to help users understand trolling, gauge online identity, and create more civil discourse through anonymity, guided discussion, and other techniques to reverse that trend.
To learn more about Polarization Lab tools, experiments, and why you really spend all those hours on social media, tune into “Nicest Troll in Town: On and Offline identity, Extremism, and Polarization,” with Dr. Chris Bail, Director of the Duke University Polarization Lab and author of the challenging new book, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Original Music by Ryan Adair Rooney
Our Guest
Chris Bail
The Polarization Lab
Chris Bail. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton University Press, 2021.
Additional Resources
Adam Hughes (10/23/19). “A small group of prolific users account for a majority of political tweets sent by U.S. adults.” Pew Research Foundation.
Emma Francois (2/9/21). “Always swipe left on a moderate.” Amanda Ripley.
Alex Horton (4/11/18). “Channeling ‘The Social Network,’ lawmaker grills Zuckerberg on his notorious beginnings.” The Washington Post.
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