Chris Bail

Chris Bail is Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A leader in the emerging field of computational social science, his research examines fundamental questions of social psychology using social media data, bots, and the latest advances in machine learning. Chris is the recipient of Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships, and he has written for the New York Times and Washington Post as well as appearing on NBC Nightly News, CBS, CNN, and the BBC. He regularly consults with corporations, non-profits, governments, and social media platforms struggling to combat polarization.

Chris Bail is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing, which draws on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum to explain why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. The book takes the reader inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. You can view him commenting on social media polarization for CBS here and speaking about his book on C-Span here.