Chris Bail’s Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing is an attempt at understanding and breaking the social media echo chamber. Bail is a Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. At the lab the team endevaours to diagnose the problems with social media platforms using scientific research and builds new technology to reverse the course. Over the years, the team has collected hundreds of millions of data points that describe the behaviour of thousands of social media users over multiple years.
In this book, he talks about the several experiments he and his team ran to see the effect of the social media bubble and what is known as the echo chamber. It is common knowledge that each one of us seeks some sort of confirmation bias on our ardent views. We follow and interact with people who think like us, trapping us in what is known as an ‘echo chamber’. If only we ever stepped out of our bubbles and listened to more opposing views, we would become more accepting of the other side. Right?