A presentation by Chris Bail (Duke University). This event is part of the Digital Governance Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Digital Governance.
Abstract: In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. His research, laid out in Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalising algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.
Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A leader in the emerging field of computational social science, his research examines fundamental questions of social psychology using social media data, bots, and the latest advances in machine learning. Chris is the recipient of Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships, and he has written for the New York Times and Washington Post as well as appearing on NBC Nightly News, CBS, CNN, and the BBC. He regularly consults with corporations, non-profits, and governments. He is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing, which draws on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum to explain why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarised, not less.
This event is moderated by Daniela Stockmann, Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School.
Registration is closed.
