Review: Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”

“To explain why the echo chamber corrective flopped, Bail puts forth an alternative theory of how today’s social media is helping drive polarization and mutual contempt between partisans.”

How can self-government long persist if many of us are conducting the bulk of our political discussions on platforms where we are not acting like our true selves, and where social reality is refracted rather than accurately reflected?

For those of us concerned about the strength of American democracy (and our ability to meet the challenges of self-government in particular), this is the key takeaway question from Chris Bail’s wonderful new book, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Bail is a data science professor and director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University. And, in Breaking the Social Media Prism, he draws extensively on his research with the Polarization Lab to argue that “the rapidly growing gap between social media and real life is one of the most powerful sources of political polarization in our era.” Bail is not a cock-eyed optimist; he understands that America really is home to deep, fundamental divisions and conflicting worldviews. However, he leverages troves of data and carefully parses his team’s experiments to argue that social media—in its current form—is exacerbating our political polarization. We are polarized to begin with, but social media is making it worse.

But it is not doing so in the way we tend to think it is. Bail pushes back against the conventional wisdom that the problem with social media is that it creates “echo chambers” and, thus, extremism. When thinking through the worrisome connection between social media and polarization, many assume that people online are solely exposed to viewpoints with which they already agree, and à la Cass Sunstein’s “law of group polarization,” the more that users are exposed solely to their own side’s narratives or opinions, the more extreme and committed to their particular side of the spectrum they grow. If this were the case, then we might assume that the corrective would be enhancing partisans’ exposure to the arguments of the other side. Bail and his colleagues at the Polarization Lab tested this hypothesis. It turns out that it is incorrect.