Science & Cocktails - The technology that divides us

Social isolation

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most essential tools for understanding each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society. Still, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists and renders moderates virtually invisible.

Chris Bail leads the Polarization Lab at Duke University and is part of a team using data to show that the common perception of polarization is wrong. In his book Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing, Chris challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns and radicalizing algorithms, showing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep within us.

Echo chambers

Using innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users across the political spectrum, Chris will explain why leaving our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. He takes us inside the minds of online extremists through vivid stories that outline their lives on the platforms and beyond - detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behaviour and political opinion, Chris offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new ideas based on data experiments that can help us avoid misconceptions and have better conversations with the other side.

Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could "reset" and redesign social media from scratch through a unique experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research. This lecture provides data-driven recommendations for strengthening social media connections and shows how we can combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.