#452 Christopher Bail - Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
RECORDED ON MARCH 31st 2021.
Dr. Christopher 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, Dr. Bail’s research examines fundamental questions of social psychology, extremism, and political polarization using social media data, bots, and the latest advances in machine learning. Dr. Bail is the recipient of Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships. His research appears in top journals, such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Sociological Review. His book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, received three awards and resulted in an invitation to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention. He is the author of the recent book, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing.
In this episode, we focus on Breaking the Social Media Prism. We go through topics like online political behavior; political polarization; the effects of political campaign; misinformation; eco-chambers; the social media prism; online extremism; how moderates get muted online; what social media platforms can do; solutions to fight against political polarization; Dr. Bail’s social media platform, Discuss-It; and polarization during the covid-19 pandemic.
Time Links:
Intro
(Online) Political engagement
Political polarization
Do social media influence people’s political behavior?
Misinformation
Do people get more extreme online?
The social media prism
Fighting against political polarization
Discuss-It
Do we find more misinformation in new media?
How people deal with the political moderates
Political polarization during covid
Follow Dr. Bail’s work!
Follow Dr. Bail’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/39qKlF0
Website: https://bit.ly/2M6EnAp
ResearchGate profile: https://bit.ly/2O77kwP
Breaking the Social Media Prism: https://amzn.to/2QPcgaF
Twitter handle: @chris_bail