Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing

by Chris Bail

Overview

A revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online—and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social media

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. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit "reset" and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research.

Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691241401
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/27/2022
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	701,615
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chris Bail is professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. He is the author of Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream (Princeton). Website chrisbail.net Twitter @chris_bail

Table of Contents

Preface to the 2022 Paperback Edition ix

1 The Legend of the Echo Chamber 1

2 Why Not Break Our Echo Chambers? 12

3 What Happens When We Break Them? 26

4 The Social Media Prism 41

5 How the Prism Drives Extremism 54

6 How the Prism Mutes Moderates 68

7 Should I Delete My Account? 84

8 Hacking the Prism 99

9 A Better Social Media 116

Appendix: Research Methods 133

Acknowledgments 159

Notes 165

Bibliography 195

Index 225

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In this important and accessible book, Chris Bail shows that if you want to understand what's going on online, don't focus on people's exposure to information. Keep your eye on their quest for status and group identity. The book is rich with insights for anyone who uses social media and is essential reading for anyone who wants to improve our democracy."—Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

"In this brilliant book, Chris Bail—one of the world's leading computational social scientists—brings deep sociological knowledge, cutting-edge research, and profound empathy to one of society's most vexing problems: the increasingly polarized and uncivil nature of political discussion. Engagingly written and brimming with insight, Breaking the Social Media Prism is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how we got here and how we might escape."—Duncan J. Watts, author of Everything Is Obvious

"A pathbreaking book about how social media distorts our view of politics, polarization, and people, including those we define ourselves against. Breaking the Social Media Prism illuminates a path out of the echo chamber and offers new ways to see the world, going beyond the numbers to reveal the gap between the things we say online and the things we do in real life."—Eric Klinenberg, author of Palaces for the People

"Incredibly powerful. In this timely, well-written, and brilliant book, Christopher Bail explains why it is up to people, not platforms, to fix the problem of social media echo chambers distorting American politics."—James N. Druckman, Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

"A tour de force. Breaking the Social Media Prism is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand our current political climate and engage in positive social and political change."—Mabel Berezin, Cornell University, author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security, and Populism in the New Europe

Editorial Reviews

02/15/2021

Sociologist Bail (Terrified), the director of Duke University’s Polarization Lab, examines how social media fuels political extremism by “distort people’s understanding of themselves and others” in this brisk, data-driven account. Bail contends that Facebook and Twitter, among other platforms, empower extremists on the right and the left by improving their social status, which leads to the silencing of moderate voices who fear retribution for posting anything political, and gives people a warped sense of those who disagree with them on such issues as gun control and immigration. Fears of social media echo chambers are overblown, Bail argues, citing evidence that polarization actually increases when people are exposed to other viewpoints. He also contends that Russian internet trolls had less impact on public opinion during the 2016 presidential election than is commonly believed, draws on extensive interviews with social media users to explore the profound differences between people’s online and real-life personas, and lucidly details his own efforts to develop a new social media platform that cultivates more civil discourse. This is a persuasive and well-informed look at one of today’s most pressing social issues. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Terrific book.

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Democracy Works podcast

"Innovative. . . .this book will challenge many of your beliefs about the online world including that the solution is to completely disengage. . . . We suggest you read Breaking the Social Media Prism and evaluate your own online behavior and those you bump into."

Purple Principle podcast

Winner of the Science Breakthrough of the Year in Social Science, Falling Walls Foundation

A Behavioral Scientist's Notable Book

"A FiveBooks Best Nonfiction Books of the Year"

"A Next Big Idea Club Selection"

From the Publisher

"Shattering popular myths and in the process, uncovering some extraordinary revelations, Chris Bail’s enormously influential book, Breaking the Social Media Prism is a much needed antidote in, and, for bewildering times where fake news proliferates and political polarization runs amok on various social media platforms."

Blogternator

2021-01-16
Social media imprisons us inside echo chambers—or does it?

After conducting a more or less standard sociological survey whose methodology is laid out in an appendix, Bail, who directs the Polarization Lab at Duke, offers a fruitful suggestion: The echo chamber effect, by which social media users surround themselves with those who agree with them politically—social media arguments are almost always about politics—may in fact represent a chicken-and-egg conundrum. “How,” asks the author, “could we be sure that people’s echo chambers shape their political beliefs, and not the other way around?” His findings suggest that both may be at play, to varying degrees. Some users become radicalized over the course of weeks and months of internet arguing while others are firebrands online but apparently moderate in real life. As Bail writes, “the rapidly growing gap between social media and real life is one of the most powerful sources of political polarization in our era.” Interestingly, he notes, people who were experimentally exposed to contending points of view tended to become more hardened in their beliefs. The explanatory power of the echo chamber—a term, Bail notes, that predates the internet by decades—goes only so far; the real source of polarization lies within ourselves. Even more interestingly, he observes, most Americans, left to their own devices, avoid the subject of politics and tend toward a moderate view. What pushes people to extremes is the narcissistic thrill of spouting off and gathering likes as a reward. Meanwhile, the moderate majority, shouted down, stays quiet. “Status seeking on social media creates a vicious cycle of political extremism,” writes Bail, and that extremism correlates closely with a lack of social status offline, which makes online ugliness all the more attractive.

A study that raises as many questions as it answers but provides useful pointers for understanding online (mis)behavior.

Kirkus Reviews