#39: Social Media Polarization with Chris Bail

06/07/21 • 49 min

Chris Bail is a computational social scientist. He wrangles the data that our social interactions leave behind to better understand how ideas spread. He is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, he studies political extremism on social media using tools from the emerging field of computational social science.

He is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing.

Things we mention in this episode:

Internet bots for good and evil
@simscreens: A Twitter bot tweeting out frames from The Simpsons
Using Twitter bots to understand polarization (Bail et al., 2018)
Many people just don’t care about politics (check out my interview with Nathan Kalmoe)
Dr. Bail’s earlier work on how anti-Muslim sentiment spreads (Bail, 2016)
Tools developed by the Polarization Lab to fight back against polarization

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Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/social-media-polarization-with-chris-bail/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

06/07/21 • 49 min

Opinion Science - #39: Social Media Polarization with Chris Bail

Transcript

Andy Luttrell:

There are robots everywhere. And not like the housekeeping robot in the Jetsons. I’m talking internet bots. They’re a little less exciting than the robots of sci-fi, but they might be more powerful. Bots are little bits of software that take care of automated tasks online. Like search engines use bots to take walks through the internet and pick up new websites. And bots can be bad—they can be used by cyber-attackers to take down websites and extort t

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