The KIND Foundation created Pop Your Bubble, a first-of-its-kind social experiment, featuring a tool to help people triumph over technology. The secret was our “anti-algorithm” — an algorithm that matched users with people who were most different from them (rather than just showing them more of what they already “like”).

We didn’t just talk about our divided nation — we offered a concrete solution to help people actually listen to one another. The tool was the centerpiece of our experiment, giving anyone access to a personalized array of strangers who would “pop their bubble.” To find these strangers, we analyzed a user’s Facebook profile (age, location, likes, shares, etc.) and searched for people that were the most different from them. Once a user followed ten new people they could pop their bubble, populating their news feed with perspectives from outside their world view.

Pop Your Bubble was a social experiment conducted in multiple parts.

First we exposed the problem, showing ten participants the surprisingly skewed makeup of their political bubbles. We then challenged our participants to pop their social media bubbles, documenting their reactions in a film.

Next we built a Facebook tool and a custom “anti-algorithm,” giving the whole nation a chance to fix their news feeds. The tool analyzed users’ Facebook profiles (age, location, likes, shares, etc.) to find strangers that were the most different from them, and made it easy to follow any of them on Facebook with a single tap. Once users followed ten of those strangers, they could “pop their bubble” and share the news with their friends. After popping, the user’s Facebook feeds would be populated with thoughts, opinions, and daily life updates dramatically different than the ones they were used to.

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In the first two weeks, Pop Your Bubble resulted in more than 140 million earned media impressions, including coverage from The Washington Post, Fast Company, CNN, and more, as well as 25 million Twitter impressions. The tone was overwhelmingly positive, positioning Pop Your Bubble as a solution to the problem everyone was talking about.

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Most importantly, within the same time period, our audience established over 40,000 new relationships, furthering the KIND Foundation’s mission to connect people from all walks of life.

After the 2016 election, everyone was talking about “social media bubbles.” Rather than just tap into an existing conversation, Pop Your Bubble provided Americans with an actual tool to break out of their echo chambers and listen to one another.

We conducted our own study of social media users, analyzing how their views compared with the views they typically saw in their feeds. The majority of people said they considered themselves open-minded, but only 5% reported seeing social media posts from outside their worldview. This finding was a jarring one: Even if people saw themselves as open-minded, their online behavior didn’t quite match up.

The KIND Foundation was founded on the belief that kindness and empathy can change our world for the better, and Pop Your Bubble enabled Americans to turn their belief in open-mindedness into action.

To bring together a diverse group for discourse, we targeted urban, suburban, and rural U.S. areas, as well as people across the political spectrum. We focused on driving diversity among users, and adapted our targeting throughout the program to maintain a balance of participants from all walks of life.

In 2017, America was divided. The era of social media was supposed to be connecting us all, but it was actually making things worse — many people were only seeing content from like-minded individuals in their news feeds, driving an even greater wedge between people with varying perspectives.

The KIND Foundation exists to foster kinder, more empathetic communities, so we had to step in — instead of just talking about the problem, we created a real solution: a social experiment, centered around a tool that could actively create change.