1/ Do you feel hopeless about political polarization on social media? Introducing a new suite of apps, bots, and other tools that you can use to make this place less polarizing from our Duke Polarization Lab: polarizationlab.com/our-tools
One of the biggest problems with social media is that it amplifies extremists and mutes moderates, leaving us all feeling more polarized than we really are. Our tools can help you avoid extremists and identify moderates with whom you might engage in more productive conversations.
The Duke Polarization Lab’s Bipartisanship Leaderboard identifies politicians, celebrities, activists, journalists, media outlets, and advocacy groups whose posts get likes from people in both parties: polarizationlab.com/bipartisanship…
Meet Polly, a bot who retweets messages from the opinion leaders on our bipartisanship leaderboard every few hours to help you identify people on the other side with whom you might find compromise: polarizationlab.com/our-bots
What are the issues on social media where there is room for compromise? This tool tracks terms that both Republicans and Democrats are discussing on Twitter, and analyzes the text of these posts to see if they share the same sentiment about them: polarizationlab.com/issue-tracker
What about the trolls? Use our Troll-o-meter to learn how to identify the characteristics of online extremists and monitor the types of language that they use: polarizationlab.com/troll-o-meter.
You can also use our tools to identify whether you are in an echo chamber. But make sure to read our research that suggests stepping outside your echo chamber can also be counter-productive if not done properly: pnas.org/content/pnas/1… (ungated)
We’re also developing a Polarization Pen Pal Network to connect real social media users with opposing views, since research shows brief conversations among non-elite people can have strong depolarizing effects:
To learn more about these apps and how we can create a bottom-up movement to fight polarization, read the first chapter of my new book Breaking the Social Media Prism: bit.ly/38Ozzrt If you like it, support the indie booksellers linked here: bit.ly/2OBlsip.
Or, join me at one of the next few public lectures I’ll be giving about my new book and the new technology described above listed here: bit.ly/3qUQONX including a free event at @DukeU tomorrow [registration required]
If you want to get updates about the new technology we create to improve political discussions on social media, subscribe to our mailing list here: polarizationlab.com/subscribe
If you have ideas about how to make these tools better, reach out: polarizationlab.com/contact-us. We try hard to translate insights from research into actionable tools, but this is easier said than done. We want to make academia more open and transparent, for the benefit of all.
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Many have expressed skepticism about calls for healing and #depolarization over the past few days. But what does the latest research indicate about the prospects for reconciliation? Let’s look at the #SocSciResearch...1/9
An experiment that asked Democrats and Republicans to discuss politics in person for just 15 minutes improved their attitudes towards each other by *70 percent* compared to a control group. See @m_levendusky ‘s forthcoming book “Our Common Bonds” 2/9
Brief cross-party conversations seem to be effective even if they occur on an online chat platform created to pair partisans to discuss controversial topics (~9 point increase on a 0-100 point “feeling thermometer”. See @erinrossiter’s job market paper (then hire her ;) 3/9
1/n Are you a *complete beginner* in computational social science who wants to learn how to code? I'm happy to announce our new "coding bootcamp" video tutorials for the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science: compsocialscience.github.io/summer-institu…
2/n I cover everything from setting up Rstudio to data cleaning (and "wrangling"), visualization, programming, modeling, communicating (w/Markdown, Rpres, and Shiny) as well as collaboration w/Github
3/n Though there are MANY great intro tutorials out there, this one is designed with computational social scientists in mind-- it offers examples w/ Twitter data, mobility data for COVID-19, and data about the opioid crisis.
1/n How do computational social scientists land non-academic jobs? I asked this question to a panel of senior leaders in for-profit and non-profit companies on a wonderful webinar yesterday, and I’d like to share what I learned:
2/n The cadence of non-academic work is very different. Academics like to take their time developing the perfect research design, but in other settings, people need answers, fast. Also, many academics are used to working alone, whereas most non-academic work is team-based.
3/n You need a good elevator pitch—one that makes it immediately clear how you can add value to a business or organization, BUT
1/n Did Russian trolls actually influence the attitudes and behaviors of U.S. social media users? Our Polarization Lab’s new article suggests the answer might be “no” pnas.org/content/early/…
2. Many people think Russian trolls exerted strong influence upon U.S. social media users because of the sheer scale and apparent sophistication of their techniques. There is also anecdotal evidence that IRA accounts succeeded in inspiring American activists to attend rallies.
3. Though many studies have analyzed the content and strategy of these campaigns, to our knowledge, no studies have examined whether they actually shaped the attitudes or behaviors of large groups of U.S. social media users.
1/5 Interested in learning how to collect and analyze social media data using topic models, text networks, or word2vec? I'm pleased to announce I am releasing an open source version of my "Text as Data" class from Duke's Data Science program: cbail.github.io/textasdata/Tex…
2/5 The course website (above) includes tutorials on a range of subjects with annotated R code. The class assumes basic knowledge of R and describes the techniques we use in the @polarization lab to run studies like this: pnas.org/content/115/37… and this: pnas.org/content/113/42…
3/5 All datasets used in the tutorials are hosted on my Github site, which also includes all source files for the tutorials themselves: github.com/cbail
1/8 Did you know that Twitter is experimenting with new features that would expose its users to opposing political views? In this @nytimes piece, I describe why this idea could backfire based upon a large online experiment recently conducted by my lab: nyti.ms/2Nu45gL
2/8 We surveyed, 1,225 Republican and Democratic Twitter users about their views on social policies. One week later, we offered them money to follow a Twitter account which they were told would tweet 24 times each day for one month. They were not told what the bots would tweet.
3/8 The Twitter account gradually began tweeting messages from politicians, media organizations, and advocacy groups with opposing political views. We tracked whether people paid attention by asking them questions about these messages.