By Eric Ferreri
Senior Writer
Office of News & Communications
Duke University
When he was 11, Chris Bail and his family moved from the Boston suburbs to the French Congo, a turbulent African nation whose fragile peace was routinely upended by three warring military factions.
The 18 months or so living there—while his father worked as a doctor and public health activist for the World Health Organization—shaped Bail forever. He saw his mother nearly die when a knife was thrown near her at a market, and his father imprisoned when he refused to pay a bribe.
Chris and his mother soon fled the country, and his father followed six months later.
Bail’s memories, embedded forever, have helped shape his scholarly path; the goal: to explain why people who are so similar often hate each other so much. His 2015 book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream,” examined anti-Muslim extremism.
In his new book, “Breaking the Social Media Prism,” Bail dives into political polarization and its manifestations on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Spun from research he and others have done at Duke’s Polarization Lab, Bail examines why political partisans are so unlikely to be swayed by other points of view, and offers tips and tools for people attempting to navigate social media in good faith.
Bail, a computational social scientist with Duke’s sociology department, spoke recently with Duke Today. Here are excerpts: