There can be no discussion of contemporary politics without mention of social media, a significant and perhaps the defining attribute of this moment in time. But things are a bit more complex than that — who and what else is really driving these divides? This third panel of the polarisation series, moderated by mobilisier and campaigner Alison Goldsworthy, examined the ways social media divides us, and what the government and technology companies can do about it.

Chair: Alison Goldsworthy - Ali is CEO of the The Depolarization Project and Co-author of Poles Apart. A movement builder and political adviser by background, she founded and built the fastest growing and most engaged NGO movement in the UK. Vice Chair of the political grant maker, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, she got her Masters from Stanford, where she co-designed their first course on political depolarisation. A Senior Research Fellow at Lecturer at The Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, Cambridge, her work has appeared in most major national and international publications and she occasionally fronts productions for BBC Radio 4. Ali tweets at @aligoldsworthy 

Chris Bail is a Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, he studies political extremism on social media using tools from the emerging field of computational social science. He is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and the BBC, among other media outlets.

Imran Ahmed is the founding CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He is a recognized authority on the social dynamics of social media, and what goes wrong in those spaces—such as identity-based hate, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and modern extremism. Imran regularly features in the international media as an expert voice and advises politicians in the US, UK, EU, and elsewhere on policy and legislation. He was raised in Manchester, England, and holds an MA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. He lives in Washington DC.

Maria Exner is a journalist with 15 years experience of reporting, innovation and leading newsrooms. She studied cultural sociology at the London School of Economics before she became the cultural editor then in 2014 deputy editor-in-chief at ZEIT ONLINE. Since 2020 she is editor-in-chief of ZEITmagazin, the weekly supplement of DIE ZEIT. She developed future-oriented magazine journalism and a variety of innovative digital projects. She built the Z2X Ideas Festival for under-30s and was co-responsible for the founding of the award-winning dialogue project, "Deutschland Spricht" and the platform, “My Country Talks,” which enables editorial offices around the world to organize discourse between people with different opinions. Her work seamlessly integrates aspects of journalism, technology and democracy.