美国国家公共电台 NPR Tech Creates Our Political Echo Chambers. It Might Also Be A Solution

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

About two-thirds of adults get their news on social media. That's according to the Pew Research Center. During the presidential campaign, we saw how easily tech can polarize our country. But can it also help bring people together? From WBUR in Boston, Asma Khalid reports on some experiments trying to do just that.

ASMA KHALID, BYLINE¹: Alison Lu had voted for Hillary Clinton, and she was in shock on election night.

ALISON LU: Confusion as to, you know, what was going on, why it was happening.

KHALID: She opened her Facebook page searching for answers. But she couldn't find any Trump²-supporting friends.

LU: You know, none of them showed themselves on my Facebook feed.

KHALID: To figure things out, she joined this new online platform her Harvard Business School classmate had created. It's called Hi From The Other Side. The goal is to take two people, one Donald Trump supporter, one Hillary Clinton supporter, match them up, introduce them and allow them to talk in real life.

LU: Because at that time, I think there was, like, a general sense of helplessness on my end, I just wanted to do something to try to help me just understand.

KHALID: Lu was matched up with Dennis O'Brien, a 26-year-old working in IT security. She came to our studios. And together, we gave O'Brien a ring on skype.

(SOUNDBITE OF RINGING)

DENNIS O'BRIEN: Hey, it's been awhile. I'm in a Dunkin' Donuts. I just got out of work.

KHALID: O'Brien had voted for Trump. After the election, he remembers seeing young women crying.

O'BRIEN: All these people were, like, legitimately³ terrified. And I couldn't wrap my mind around why.

KHALID: He wanted to know why. And so when he saw something about Hi From The Other Side on Facebook...

O'BRIEN: I just clicked it and said, all right, you know, what the heck? I can meet someone new, and I can learn about why - you know, what's going through everybody else's mind a little bit.

KHALID: Think of it as going on a blind date to talk politics. On a random⁴ Tuesday night, Lu and O'Brien met up at a burger place in Cambridge. Here's how they both remember it.

O'BRIEN: We were there for, like, two hours. She wasn't crazy. There was never a moment where I felt stupid or I felt like, you know, I was an idiot. And, you know, likewise towards her.

LU: He's not, like, you know, racist⁵ and bigoted⁶, like I think the stereotype⁷ - right? - of some Trump supporters are. And I think what helps was also we were able to find a little bit of common ground.

KHALID: Common ground on climate change. But they both also realized they probably just have different priorities.

LU: I really wouldn't say that our conversation really changed each other's minds at all. But it was valuable to have that new perspective.

O'BRIEN: You know, we were both very open to what the other one had to say when. No one got mad.

KHALID: And that is the goal for Henry Tsai. He created High From The Other Side.

HENRY TSAI: The day after the election, it was kind of clear that discourse⁸ in this country was not maybe where we want it to be. There's a lot of demonizing or dismissiveness.

KHALID: Tsai says about 4,500 people have signed up. It's an online platform. But he admits for it to work, you have to take the conversation offline and meet in real life - or at least via video chat. Lu and O'Brien agree.

O'BRIEN: I think social media just helps reinforce the hate. It just pushes everybody apart because, you know, when I see something, I'm not talking to a person. I'm just typing a bunch of letters in a message.

KHALID: And those online messages tend to polarize us politically. That's what Deb Roy noticed. During the campaign, he and his team at the MIT Media Lab tracked every tweet about presidential politics in the country. And as they looked at this big data, they wondered, what if you could flip⁹ your Twitter feed and see the world through someone else's eyes?

DEB ROY: And what if some of the things you experience actually aren't so different, aren't so foreign, aren't so disconnected from your interests.

KHALID: Roy and his team created a way to do this, an online tool called FlipFeed. Roy says downloads are in the thousands. But he also insists this was not designed as a consumer product. It's a lab experiment. Still, he's optimistic that tech can be used to create empathy. Of course, the major hitch¹⁰ is that these tech projects take initiative from users, and maybe a lot of us are just content to passively roam around our own social media bubbles. For NPR News, I'm Asma Khalid.