Tech & the City: Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing, on Zoom
With author Chris Bail in conversation with Issie Lapowsky, senior reporter at Protocol, Cosponsored by Goethe-Institut and Gray Area

This meeting will take place over Zoom. To receive an invitation to the meeting, please sign up using the Eventbrite link below. You will receive an invitation and a link to Zoom the day before the event.

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Cosponsored by Goethe-Institut and Gray Area

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand and interact with each other. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, Breaking the Social Media Prism 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 tools 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 and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research.

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). His website is https://www.polarizationlab.com/. Twitter @chris_bail

Issie Lapowsky is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.

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