With Chris Bail, Founding Director of the Polarization Lab. The fact that social media platforms draw out and reward anti-social, polarizing behaviour goes hand-in-hand with the gendered hate and abuse so common to digital interactions. We can’t fix one without fixing the other.   

Nor can we ignore what social media does for us psychologically and socially. We use these platforms to build our personal identities. We use them to find community and a sense of belonging. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It's often a good thing. But it gets dangerous when platforms reward attacking and hurtful behaviour, when they encourage the targeting of vulnerable people, and when they make it easy to exert power over those with less power. 

In that sense, it’s easy to see why women, girls, and gender-diverse people, especially those who face multiple barriers, are so unsafe in digital spaces. Digital spaces reinforce and amplify the unbalanced power and abuse we know too well in our day-to-day lives.  

There’s a glimmer of hope: digital spaces are ultimately human built. The fact that they’re like this is not inevitable and it’s not unchangeable. Over coming months, we’re delving into this with leading experts and content creators, releasing in-depth episodes every single week. We talk about the problem and what we can do to change it. We offer practical tips to help you in your digital life, and we talk about what it means to “take back the tech” for all of us. 

We’re joined by Chris Bail, 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. He is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing. A Guggenheim Fellow and Carnegie Fellow, Chris's research appears in leading publications such as Science, the American Journal of Public Health, and New York Times. He appeared on NBC Nightly News, CBS News, BBC, and CNN. His research has been covered by Wired, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and more. He regularly lectures to government, business, and the non-profit sector and consults with social media platforms struggling to combat polarization. He serves on the Advisory Committee to the National Science Foundation's Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate and helped create Duke's Interdisciplinary Data Science Program. Chris received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. 

Relevant Links: Polarization Lab, The Facts about Gendered Digital Hate, Harassment, and Violence 

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