Christopher A. Bail

Affiliation: Polarization Lab, Duke University (Principal Investigator)

Specialization: Political polarization, social media behavior, computational social science methods.

Key works

• Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization (with Argyle, Brown, Bumpus, Chen, Hunzaker, Lee, Mann, Merhout, Volfovsky) — large-scale field experiment on Twitter; respondents offered money to follow bots retweeting opposing-ideology accounts; Republicans became substantially more conservative (backfire), Democrats showed no significant change.
• Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017 (with Guay, Maloney, Combs, Hillygus, Merhout, Freelon, Volfovsky) — longitudinal study finding no evidence that IRA interaction substantially polarized partisan Twitter users in 2017; identifies echo chambers and political interest as predictors of IRA exposure.