The KIND Foundation created Pop Your Bubble, a first-of-its-kind social experiment featuring a tool to help people triumph using the power of technology. The secret was our “anti-algorithm,” which 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.” We analyzed a user’s Facebook profile (age, location, likes, shares, etc.) and served up 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 seeing.

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

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.

Data played a critical role in the way we connected our users. By analyzing basic details of someone’s Facebook profile and activity, we were able to employ our “anti-algorithm,” connecting them with people outside their bubble. An 18-year-old man from New York might have been presented with a 65-year-old female from the Midwest, then given the opportunity to follow her and add her perspective to his news feed.

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.