Academic research on political polarisation often fails to acknowledge the extent to which social media can both reflect and also distort people¡¯s attitudes, posits a book by Chris Bail, professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University in North Carolina, where he is also a director of the Polarisation Lab.

¡°There¡¯s a kind of hubris that comes with data science,¡± he explained. While it was now possible to apply machine learning to vast amounts of data about social media use, he was worried that this provides us with ¡°an incomplete picture of what is going on¡± because ¡°Twitter gives a highly selective account of people¡¯s lives¡±. It is only when we also bring in rich qualitative data about social media users that we can hope to understand the full story, he argued.

Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing explores the results of such research. The book cites, for example, a prolific tweeter it calls ¡°Ray¡±. Online, he specialised in ¡°vile¡± excremental imagery such as ¡°a long, snaking hose connected to a portable toilet on one side and a picture of Obama¡¯s face on the other¡±. Offline, however, he was ¡°one of the most polite and deferential people [we] interviewed¡± and he even ¡°went out of his way to condemn political incivility¡±.

The best way of understanding this, argued Professor Bail, was to think about Twitter not as ¡°a?rational forum where we are going to have a competition of ideas¡±, but rather as a place we visit largely to ¡°create and cultivate identities that make us feel good. Ray is an outcast in real life, but online he gets all this positive feedback.¡±

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There are also strong forces on social media that tend to mute the voices of moderates. Professor Bail¡¯s book cites the case of ¡°Sara¡±, a ¡°moderate Republican¡± who was subjected to vicious abuse when she tweeted in defence of people¡¯s right to own guns.

This soon escalated into someone saying that ¡°they hoped my daughter found our gun and shot me¡±, she explained in the book. When she tried to reach out to a liberal critic by pointing out they had both survived breast cancer, the only response was: ¡°I?hope you?die.¡±

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For someone with ¡°the fairly nuanced political views¡± that Sara revealed in interviews, Professor Bail suggested, ¡°fear of reprisals from extremists¡± acted as a strong incentive for keeping quiet about them.

More generally, social media acted more as a prism than a mirror for political attitudes, so that ¡°looking online makes you misunderstand extremists as representative of the other side¡±. The many academics who operate largely within a leftist echo chamber, for example, got ¡°a?highly distorted portrait¡± of what conservatives are like in real life.

In his own case, Professor Bail recalled a ¡°humbling experience¡± when he had been ¡°highly sceptical¡± of something a Trump supporter had told him about Barack Obama, only for a fact-checking website to confirm that she was correct.

¡°We have a bit of a blind spot when these kinds of issue come up,¡± he reflected. ¡°That is one of the things that frustrates people on the right: they feel unheard and that there¡¯s a selective accounting of the truth¡­It is really important that academics don¡¯t caricature people on the right.¡±

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There were several reasons why, according to Professor Bail. For one, it already seemed ¡°a?little harder to get Republicans to participate in research¡±. Although a certain wariness of expressing contentious political views in class was probably inevitable in a highly polarised country, he suspected that ¡°the concern is even stronger among conservative students¡­If students don¡¯t feel they can discuss evidence in the classroom, that¡¯s really concerning.¡±

Yet the most damaging result of ¡°the social media prism¡± among academics, claimed Professor Bail, was when it led to some of them seeing ¡°the other side as so unreasonable¡± that ¡°depolarisation efforts just aren¡¯t worth?it¡±.

However, ¡°most of the issues people in universities care most about, such as preventing racism, increasing awareness about climate change and so on ¨C are fundamentally about winning hearts and minds. If we want to change people¡¯s behaviour and make them less likely to discriminate based on race, casting off large sections of the population as simple racists is probably going to backfire.¡±

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com