Join us as Chris Bail, director of Duke University's Polarization Lab,  is interviewed by Meagan Levinson about his newly released book that provides a revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online—and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social media.

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible.

Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. He studies political tribalism, extremism, and social psychology using  data from social media and tools from the emerging field of computational social science.  Website: chrisbail.net |  Twitter:  @chris_bail

Meagan Levinson is Executive Editor and Head of Paperback Publishing at Princeton University Press.

Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing