The Trust Engineers

Feb 24, 2023

Explore the fascinating world of social media and its emotional consequences. Discover how language nuances can shift online interactions for the better. Delve into Facebook's secret experiments and the ethics of manipulating emotions. Learn how massive data collection is changing social science while raising privacy concerns. Uncover the challenges of forming genuine connections in digital dialogue and the impact on political discourse. This thought-provoking discussion leaves us questioning the morality of social engineering in our online lives.

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ANECDOTE

Christmas Photo Reports

Facebook users reported millions of photos during Christmas 2011.
Most reports miscategorized content like babies and puppies as hate speech, often from people in the photos.

INSIGHT

"It's" Embarrassing

Adding "it's" before emotions increased selection from 50% to 78%.
This may reframe the embarrassment from the person to the photo itself.

ADVICE

Message Nudges

Pre-written messages increased communication.
Try personalizing with names and using "please" instead of "sorry".

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First aired in 2015, this is an episode about social media, and how, when we talk online, things can quickly go south. But do they have to? In the earlier days of Facebook, we met with a group of social engineers who were convinced that tiny changes in wording can make the online world a kinder, gentler place.

We just have to agree to be their lab rats.

Because Facebook, or something like it, is where we share and like and gossip and gripe. And before we were as aware of its impact, Facebook had a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’d never seen. We got to peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who were tweaking our online experience, to try to make the world a better place. And even now, just under a decade later, we’re still left wondering if that’s possible, or even a good idea.

EPISODE CREDITS

Reported by - Andrew ZolliOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Mooninites

REFERENCES:

ArticlesAndrew Zolli’s blog post about Darwin’s Stickers (https://zpr.io/ZpMeUnRmVMgP) which highlights another one of these Facebook experiments that didn’t make it into the episode.

BooksAndrew Zolli’s Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (https://zpr.io/7fYQ9iDYAQBu)Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (https://zpr.io/9rU5CGSit3W4)

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