## Notes --- - [[2023-07-05-12-45 we should all know less about each other]] - [[leaving your echo chamber doesn’t fix anything]] ## Summary --- Duke professor of sociology and public policy Christopher Bail ran a simple experiment in 2017 to study how technology divides us. They recruited 1,220 Twitter users and paid them $11 to follow an account for a month. Those who identified as Republicans were assigned to follow a bot that retweeted posts from Democrats; those who identified as Democrats followed a bot retweeting posts from Republicans. The idea was to break people away from their echo chambers and engage with new ideas. Well, it didn’t work. According to Bail: > Nobody became more moderate… Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal. Social media companies tell us that they make us more connected, but that isn’t inherently a good thing. Sometimes we just need to let other people mind their own business. And, in fact, social media might be making it more difficult for us to talk to each other. In general, it might be good if we just heard from each other less. ## Highlights --- >It turns out that in a country as large and diverse as ours, a certain amount of benign neglect of other people’s odd folkways is more conducive to social peace than a constant, in-your-face awareness of clashing sensibilities. >Right-wing politics has come to revolve around infuriating imagined liberal observers. It’s as if angry conservatives live with hectoring progressives in their heads all the time. Social media may not have created this mentality, but it badly exacerbates it. <mark style="background: #CACFD9A6;">After all, there’s no point owning the libs if none are watching.</mark> >In 2017, Deb Roy, director of the M.I.T. Center for Constructive Communication and former chief media scientist at Twitter, held informal meetings in small towns to talk to people about social media. Several times, people told him they’d given up speaking to neighbors or others in town after seeing them express their opinions online. It was the first time, Roy told me, that he heard directly from people for whom social media “is blocking conversations that otherwise would have been happening just organically.”